When you think about it, it is amazing how easy it is today to print on a sheet of paper, and how hard it is to print on cloth. Anyone can buy a laser or an inkjet printer for a couple hundred dollars and print on paper all day long at rates up to 10 sheets a minute. On the other hand, you would be really lucky to print one T-shirt every five minutes -- the machine is also going to cost a lot more, and you will have to do each one by hand!

In screen printing (also called silk screening), you start with a square wooden frame about the size of a T-shirt. Over this frame you tightly stretch a piece of sheer fabric (originally silk, now polyester). This is the screen. Over this sheer fabric you put a thin sheet of plastic into which you have cut holes where you want ink to appear on the T-shirt. You can either cut the holes with a scalpel (an arduous task), or you can use a liquid plastic coating that's sensitive to ultraviolet light and "cut" the holes with light.

Next, you place your T-shirt on a flat board and press the screen onto the fabric. By coating the screen with thick ink using a squeegee, you cause the ink to flow through the screen onto the T-shirt.

For multi-color designs, you do this multiple times, making a separate screen for each color in the design. A three color design will have three screens, a four color four screen… When printing a multicolor design you start with the lightest color and move up to the darkest.

Depending on your color choice and garment color (especially if you are printing with light ink on a dark garment) – a single color may need to be laid more than once to reach the desired shading or a process called a  flash is performed to create the desired result.