Dear friend,

I know you are angry. You have every right to be. You were at that little town named Kaikoura last summer, and you saw those tote bags hanging at the entrance of the Global Gossip internet café, you liked them, you liked them very much, and you bought one. Either the “Bagpacker” or the “Kaikoura” one. And you started using it. Everything seems fine. But one day, it became dirty, especially if you tend to throw your bags on the floors just like me. And you washed it. And when you took it off from the washing machine, you realized that the colour was faded. It even took off on some parts of the bag. Just like these:

This is unacceptable! You have every right to be angry! I am too, very very angry. And sad. This is not my fault. Not really. Still, I am ready to take the blame on me. And here is the story:

When I decided to make those bags, I had no clue about screen printing. And I believe in profession. I believe in experience. I believe in handing the job to the experts. That’s why I saved an extra $600 dollars to pay to a professional screen printing company for the printing of those bags. I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted them to be printed with water based inks, so they would be soft to the touch, and more environmentally friendly.

And they looked perfect too. So I started selling them. And you my friend, ended up buying one. It never occurred to me to test them, to wash them to see if they would fade. Why would I? I had chosen the biggest screen printing company in South Island. Though it was two hours away from Kaikoura, I went there on the day of the printing. I saw the process, I saw their huge drying machines. What could go wrong?

Bu something did. And unfortunately, I only noticed it only after 4 months, right after I did my first water based screen printing. During those months, I had started to study and explore screen printing and learned that water based was the hardest ink to handle. It has to be cured / dried in a professional screen printing oven with airflow for 3 minutes at the same temperature. I cured the first t-shirt I printed in the conveyor oven I was testing, and I wanted to do a wash test to that t-shirt to see how good the oven was handling the curing process. But I needed another test subject to compare so I wasted the t-shirt I printed with one of the bags, a pink one, that was printed by that company. The t-shirt turned out to be perfectly fine, while the ink on the bag washed out! Actually, I was expecting the opposite. I was expecting the ink on the t-shirt I printed to fade out since, you know, I was very new to the process, and the bags were printed by a professional company.

How could this be happening? I put another bag that was printed 4 months ago inside my oven, this time I chose a green one, cured it for 3 minutes, and washed it. This time the ink was fine. It didn’t wash out. I washed it again. And again. And again. And again. It was still fine. 

That’s how I understood that the supposedly professional screen printing company under-cured all those bags! How? But more importantly, why? Their job was so simple. I don’t mean simple “simple”, of course it requires experience, knowledge, know how, and all other bla blas that which I highly respect, but all they were asked to do is print a bag, and make sure it was cured. That’s it! Not a brain surgery. And that’s what they are for, for people like me who do not know anything about screen printing and need someone to do the job for them. They have all the expensive equipment. Why in the world a company betrays itself? Sabotages it’s purpose to operate? Where is their responsibility, not for me who paid them the money they wanted without a blink, but for their own heart? Doing something wrong is much more harder than doing something right. Why they choose the wrong way? I really don’t understand.

And when I called them to ask why the ink on the bags were washing out after the first wash, they told me they also suspected they would. That they knew they were under-cured. And they didn’t warn me. How? And why? I again have no clue. They asked me to send those two bags to them, the one that washed out, and the one that didn’t was out after I cured it. Of course I didn’t. Why should I? What can they do now that they didn’t do 4 months ago? And why should I trust them, to a company who never lacked the equipment or the knowledge but the love and the passion to do their job nice and sound?  

Instead, I woke up at 5 am for the next couple of days and re-cured all the bags they printed. It was a slow process, each bag taking at least 3.5 minutes, but at least I would know the end product would be perfect. I don’t believe in the boring motto that dictates if you want a job to be done, do it yourself, but this time I decided to.

So, dear friend, if you are one of those beautiful people that made me happy by buying one of the bags between January and April 2011, sorry to say, you may experience the same problem. All you need to do is drop me a message to info@literallyyours.com, and I will send you a new one, wherever in the world you are. If you didn’t wash the bag yet, and would like to learn what to do to fix it on your own, here are your options: 1. You can ask a professional screen printing company to cure the bag for you. Just tell them that the water based ink is under-cured, and they will know exactly what to do.  2. If you don’t have any access to those kind of companies, you can turn the bag inside out, and iron the printed area, WITHOUT the steam on, carefully, always moving your hand, without letting the bag burn, I know it’s boring but, for 20 minutes. This also will heat set the ink and the ink won’t take off after the washing.

If you own a bag that has Literally Yours logo inside, you don’t need to worry at all. It is one of the ones that I printed, cured, and tested. They are perfectly fine.

Literally yours,

Ayca