For more than 25 years, Puka Prints has been breathing life into local fabrics.
Images by John Hook
At the industrial Puka Prints warehouse in Kalihi, it takes two people to screenprint the fabric unfurled on two 30-yard tables — one employee on each side, taking turns pulling a wide, wood-handled squeegee across fine silk stretched onto a 24-inch-wide frame. Back and forth, back and forth, until the ink is spread smoothly enough to create the desired print — in this case, pūhala atop an ʻilima-orange cotton fabric for The Hawaiian Force, a Hilo-based aloha wear brand. Then they move two steps down, leaving the space of a frame between the wet ink and where they place it down again, repeating the process until they reach the end of the table.
Screenprinting is a matter of hurry up and wait. After the first pass down the 60 yards of fabric, which takes about an hour, the team waits 10 minutes for it to dry before starting another pass to fill in the blanks. “A lot of things we do is kinda old school,” says owner Chris Yokogawa at his onsite office, where his two dogs rest in a small pen. Customers choose the color for their print from a physical book of fabric swatches, after which an employee with decades of experience carefully mixes ink from various buckets into a perfect match. For the custom designs, digital files are sent to a company in Los Angeles that burns film positives on transparencies, which Puka Prints then uses to make large wood-framed silk screens. The films and screens are stored indefinitely at the warehouse, ready to be pulled out to fulfill an order at a customer’s behest…