As Ultimate Leavers Hoodies we pride ourselves as being the hoodie printing specialists in Scotland and the UK. We have over 3 decades worth of experience with screenprinting, heat transfer and embroidery techniques. We’re passionate about providing the highest quality personalised garments for school leavers, college students and university graduates in Edinburgh, across Scotland and the whole of the UK and we are committed to bringing you the best personalised hoodies available.
What makes a leavers hoodie so Ultimate? We offer a customized screen print, a personalised nickname and embroidery, all included in the price, so there are no hidden costs or extra set up charges! And we also offer free delivery with each order! We understand that students and graduates all want to be different and stand out from the crowd. That’s why with our simple online shop, each individual can choose their own size, colour and put in their own nickname. When picking out our hoodie catalogue, we chose the highest quality garments which give school leavers, college students and university graduates the widest choice for their leavers hoodie. All of our hoodies are made to order in our workshop with your personalised and custom made leavers design, so we are able to insure the best quality for each hoodie that we send out.
So how exactly does screen printing work?
Screen printing has been around for quite some time now. Essentially, it’s a fine mesh with a design stretched over a frame, which allows different images to be printed onto garments, paper, even wood. It first appeared in China thousands of years ago, but wasn’t very popular in Europe until silk mesh became more widely available. The process is also known as silk-screening because that was the main material used instead of the polyester mesh we use nowadays. Fun fact: You might be surprised to learn that one of Andy Warhol’s most popular multicoloured piece of Merlyn Monroe is actually screen printed.
The first step of our process is for you to approve the visual for the back of your leavers hoodie that our designers have come up with, so we can set up the screen. Depending on the different designs we can use more or less dense mesh for each screen. We use a photo reactive emulsion which allows us to “cure” your design onto a screen and an inverted (or mirrored) version of your design is impressed onto it, which we attach to one of our machines. We then mix the colour, pour it on top of the screen and squeegee it onto each leavers hoodie. All that’s left to do is to cure the ink onto your hoodie and the screen printing process is finished.
Screen printing is great to use for a large batch of garments with the same design. However for a personalised nickname on each hoodie we use vinyl and a heat press. Each name is cut out from a piece of vinyl, placed onto your hoodie and transferred on with heat and pressure. The process allows us to personalize each leavers hoodie individually, but takes more time for bigger orders.
The third personalisation we offer for hoodies is embroidery. Once again, artwork is very important here, but we can usually find a good quality logo of your school or university online, which we then digitize into a format our embroidery machine can read. More complicated logos with multiple colours and details can take up to an hour or even more to embroider!
Everybody loves leavers hoodies, but have you ever wondered how much care and effort goes into personalising each hoodie to make it the perfect leavers memento?
Have a look at our “how it’s made” video below to find out.
