How to wash a screen printed t-shirt
· 3 min read
A screen print doesn't crack because it's old. It cracks because of heat and friction, and both of those come from the wash, not from wearing it. Get the laundry right and a printed tee will outlast most of the plain ones in your drawer.
Here's what actually matters, roughly in order of how much damage each one does.
Turn it inside out first
This is the single easiest habit and it does most of the work. Inside a washing machine, garments scour against each other for the whole cycle. If the print is facing out, it takes all of that abrasion directly. Turned inside out, the plain back of the fabric takes it instead.
Same goes for wearing it, if you're the sort of person who wears a rucksack. Straps sitting across a chest print will wear it faster than fifty washes.
Wash cold, 30 °C or below
Ink sits on top of the fibres rather than soaking into them, and it stays slightly flexible so it can move as the fabric moves. Heat is what stiffens it. Once it's gone brittle, the next stretch is what you'll see as a crack.
Cold also keeps the cotton from shrinking and stops darker dyes bleeding into a white print. There is no upside to a hot wash here.
Skip the fabric softener
Softener works by leaving a waxy film across the fabric. On the printed panel, that film sits between you and the ink, gradually dulling the colour and loosening the ink's grip on the cotton underneath.
If a tee has gone stiff, a cup of white vinegar in the rinse does the same softening job without coating anything.
Never tumble dry
If you take one thing from this: the dryer is what kills printed tees.
It's the worst possible combination: sustained high heat to make the ink brittle, plus half an hour of tumbling to flex it while it's in that state. A print that would have survived years of washing can craze in a handful of dryer cycles.
Hang it up instead. A heavyweight cotton tee dries overnight, and it will hold its shape far better than a dried-and-shrunk one.
Iron around it, not over it
A hot iron pressed straight onto a print will scorch or partly melt it, and that's not reversible. If a tee genuinely needs ironing, turn it inside out and press the back of the print, or lay a tea towel over the front and press through that.
What if it's already cracked?
Nothing brings ink back once it's broken, but you can usually stop it spreading. Move that tee to cold hand-washes, air-dry it flat, and keep it away from the iron entirely. Light crazing on a well-worn tee tends to settle into looking deliberate rather than getting steadily worse.
And when you put it away
Fold printed tees rather than hanging them. A hanger puts the whole weight of the garment on the shoulder seams and slowly stretches the neck out, which is usually what makes an old tee look tired long before the print does.
If you're stacking them, avoid folding straight through the middle of a large print every time, because a permanent crease across the same line will show.
The short version
- Inside out, every time
- Cold wash, 30 °C or below
- No fabric softener
- Hang to dry, never tumble
- Iron the back, or not at all
Every Trials tee is screen printed by hand in small runs, so it's worth the extra thirty seconds at the machine. Have a look at Time Loop and Golden Hour. And if something arrives and isn't right, the returns page explains where to go from there.