None of the inks survived the most basic of wash test within a 24 hour period. The good news is that they are safe to wash-out of t-shirts. I'm going to dig out my old Water-based ink selection and check out Dharma Trading for the Speedball water based inks to see if the labels read drain-safe. Back when I used water-based inks for all of my printing the shirts required an activator, which was a carcinogen, to be mixed into the different colors. This chemical was like a fixer and it reduced the pot life of the inks, but it allowed them to be washed sooner versus later. Also I spent as much time hanging shirts on clothes lines as I did printing, so I'm not looking forward to going back in that direction.
Opacity on darks is also a big issue, but by mixing clorox substances to knock out the dye in shirts so they can be printed with water-based must reduce the strength of the cotton and in and of itself should force the manufacturer to wash the garments before they are offered for sale. Otherwise the garments would have remnants of these chemicals in the shirt when the shirt is sold to the consumer. A warning tag should also be placed on the garments if they are not washed before being sold. I like the feeling of the soft prints, but the additional cost and risk associated with the handling isn't a pretty picture.
The other issue is to mix large amounts of Soft-Hand into the pigments for reducing the thickness of plastisol. This only solves the softness problem, not the reduction of PVCs in inks problem.
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