Every garment that leaves our shop at 38 Street NE starts as someone’s idea — a team name, a small-business logo, a one-off gift. This month we pulled a handful of those jobs off the floor and pointed a camera at them. Here’s a look at what came through, method by method, and a little bit of how it gets made.
Screen printing: built for the run
Screen printing is still the workhorse of the shop. When an order is big enough — team merch, a brewery’s next drop, a trades crew that needs forty matching tees — nothing beats it for durability and cost per piece. Ink gets pushed through a tensioned mesh screen, cured at 330°F, and bonded straight into the fabric.
This Buzz Lawncare order was a clean three-colour spot print on heather grey. Bold mark, tight registration, the kind of job that looks sharp on a worksite and survives a season of washing.
The Play Forever Canada tees leaned the other direction — a distressed, vintage-style print where the texture is the point. Up close, you can see the halftone doing the work: thousands of tiny dots blending a single ink colour into something that reads soft and worn.
None of it leaves until it’s cured. Every print rides our Riley Cure conveyor dryer at full heat, and we wash-test random pulls before anything gets folded.
Embroidery: stitched to last
Where screen printing is about ink, embroidery is about thread — raised, tactile, and close to indestructible. It’s how premium brands mark caps, polos, jackets, and workwear. Your logo gets digitized into a stitch file, then sewn thread-by-thread on our Tajima multi-head machines, six pieces at a time.
This Blind Beauty polo was a clean left-chest job: a tidy logo, digitized to keep its detail at a small size, stitched onto navy polo.
The Elegance Custom Built Homes beanies were a favourite — a warm tan ribbed knit with the logo stitched in gold and cream. Stacked together, you can see how consistent the registration stays piece to piece. That repeatability is the whole job.
And every so often a piece is less about a brand and more about a feeling. This one was a line of cursive script — the kind of detail that’s deceptively hard to digitize and very satisfying to watch come together under the needle.
Digital printing: no minimums, no limits
Not every job needs a screen. When the run is small, the artwork is complex, or someone just wants three shirts instead of three hundred, digital printing is the call — full colour, photo-quality detail, and no per-colour setup.
The Fix Nation Restoration field-team tees are a good example: a crisp, multi-colour mark on navy, soft to the touch and ready to wear straight off the press.
It all gets locked in on our Hotronix Fusion IQ presses, which hold an exact temperature and time on every single piece — no guesswork, no scorched fabric, no prints that peel after a wash.
One shop, one standard
Screen print, embroidery, digital print, laser — it all happens under one roof in northeast Calgary, on our machines, by our hands. That’s the part we’re proudest of. No middleman, no outsourcing, and a piece doesn’t go in the box until it’s right.
Got a project of your own — 24 pieces or 2,400? Send us a quote request or start a design in the studio. We reply within one business day, every time.