Quote:
Originally Posted by ooo-ribay
You are describing silk screening. We did it in high school shop class. I made the image of a flat track motorcycle racer  . You “drag” the “blob” with a rubber squeegee, over a thin film with a silk like backing. You cut and peel the film from the porous portion where you want the paint to transfer. This is how I always assumed older pennants were made. Maybe on some I showed, the “color guy” called in sick.
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Yeah, no question about the manufacturing process here: by the 1960s, most pennant makers were silk screening their artwork and texts. And, yes, the process involved silk screen mesh, stretched tight over a wooden frame. The maker would then transfer the artwork from a sheet of paper to a photo positive--which in turn was applied to the mesh, kind of like a stencil. For a monochrome design, they'd squeegee the single color "blob" of ink over the stencil + mesh until the desired graphics and texts emerged from the openings and on to the felt beneath it. After drying, they'd hand cut the triangular pennants out, sew in the spine and tassels, then call it a day.
For polychrome designs, which Trench was always the industry leader on, they'd use like 3-4 colors per pennant. And, yes, this significantly lengthens the process; and, the manufacturing costs.
With Trench, I too have noticed slight color variations in the same pennant made over several years. Some are really bright; while others look more dull. I don't know if this is a difference in the inks used during the manufacturing process between the years; or, the effects of time itself, e.g., sun damage. Who knows? But many of their stadium pennants were sold for 10 years or more; so, it makes sense that they may have altered a color once or twice, for whatever reason.
Both Trench and ADFLAG offered their customers a polychromatic
and monochromatic version of their stadium pennants. If you look at my blog posts on these two companies, you'll see exactly what I mean. (See the Dodger and Giant pennants at the end of this piece:
https://pennantfever.weebly.com/blog...tising-flag-co ) I suspect they simply wanted to offer their retailers two different price points to market their products at.
Finally, I've noticed that many of the NL/AL champions pennants that would have been sold at a world series game were monochrome. That's probably because manufacturers didn't have a lot of time to make these; and, the multi-colored variant would have taken too long to produce.