It's More Than a Feeling

It's more than a feeling,
I began to itch again,
more than a feeling,
feel my life slip awaaaaay, aaaawaaaaayyyyy...(music continues for 20 minutes).

I've been here before and I think I am going through this process of testing inks to see if I end up at the same place I was 10 years ago. Discharge inks are exotic and toxic. There is an appeal to the non-ink ink, the missing link of screenprinting, the botox of fabric, but it is no less dangerous. I am yet to read the MSDS sheet of the inks I printed with today, but my skin was itchy, my throat was scratchy and I felt a slight amount of naseau that came and went. When I showed my wife the shirts I printed she said they made her eyes burn when I brought them into the room.

I am very sensitive to chemicals and part of this may come from the fact that I have worked with everything from frying grease, bottom paint, kevlar, silicone, t-shirt inks and photo-chemicals to varying degrees over the years. When I open a container of poly-urethane I feel the burn. I know the taste and I feel lucky that I have made it to this point without falling over. Many of my friends have died from either brain cancer or liver disease and suspiciuously I must wonder if it was the chemicals that they were around. There is one advantage to being older and that is that I can feel my way through the bad stuff while experimenting like a blind mouse and I am most likely past the stage where the slower diseases can take root and knock me out. Most of the stuff I am now working with would take 20-30 years to kill me, so I can guess that something else should kill me first. I may as well try and experiment while I can and try to find something better for the printers to come.

I sat through a Saturday seminar on discharge inks in 1990-1 and it was clear to me that I did not want to work with formaldihyde. Who would want to work with something that you are only supposed to have in your system when you are dead? This was a chemical used to discharge the dye in t-shirts. It sounded great, printing water-based on darks, but I knew I didn't have the equipment to properly vent the stuff and I decided I couldn't go forward with printing discharge at the time. Several times over the years it's come up and always the same result. There is an active ingredient necessary in discharge inks when in order to knock-out the dye in the inks. This is similar to a bleaching process, but the idea of discharge is that it won't destroy the fibers in the cotton.

I used to work in boat yards and the rule was that the younger you were the more deadly the more toxic chemicals it was that you had to work with. It was explained to me as everyone can absorb a certain amount of these things and everyone else had already reached their limit. This meant that I was handed the gilded brush and can of toxic paint then directed to crawl into a 2-3 foot space while painting upside down on my back. I did my job then, but I learned that some things will kill you and you should limit the intake of these chemicals if possible. Discharge inks still seem like a bad idea to me for regular screen printers to be using. I'm going to experiment some more, maybe I can get over the thrill of seeing the ink change color under a flash unit which causes the fumes to seep out like the after-smoke from a bong. I like the feeling of the non-ink ink and the bone colored look on the shirts, but is it worth it. Plastisol isn't pretty and PVC's may be bad somewhere in the manufacturing process, but I don't want to smoke these other potentially caustic chemicals just to get a softer shirts.

It is the misinformation about these materials that upsets me the most. I'm not a chemist and I'm not a hippy, but as a worker, a printer, I am going to try and give my customers what they want if I can. I don't want to try and change the guidelines for printers either, but I don't like the idea that the marketing of green products is infering that something is good because it looks and feels better on a shirt when it may be significantly worse for the people who have to print the shirts themselves. I am trying to reserve judgement until I completely understand the technical data on the inks I am experimenting with, but my body is an indicator of the toxicity of products too and I am not encouraged by water-based inks, discharge inks and dying type of inks as an environmentally-friendly solution for the screen-printing industry.