Yearly Archives: 2013

Hello! been screen-printing some more  🙂
btw, Shelley and Ute asked about the ink and colour-fastness of; we are using Permaset Aqua Textile Printing Ink, you can read about it, search for stockists and buy online here.  I got some at Jacksons art suppliers.  wrt colour-fastness I am veeeeery pleased to report that I have laundered my Poppies set and it came out as fresh and clean and bright as when it was first printed… phew!  (wipes sweat from brow)  I had this horrible feeling that I was going to pull an all-over pink and poppy-less set of lingerie from the washing machine, but no, this ink is marvellous stuff!  so yeah, my experience is that if you follow the instructions on the jar and iron like mad, then happy, print-y laundering will ensue.
But back to the current project…
This time I printed two large-ish pieces of fabric, and tried to make a random repeating print, one that had an interlocking-overlapping design so that repeat prints looked more organically seamless and less obvious where the design started and finished with each one.  My teacher photocopied my design to show me how you can cut it up the middle and place the sides back on themselves to see how the design needs to be altered so that it fits in visually.

Also, because I wanted my leaves to be an autumnal colour range as opposed to one single solid colour, I did not mix anything but instead plopped blobs of colour along the top of the screen and just allowed them to mix and marble together however they wanted during the screening.  I started with blobs of Mid Yellow and Purple, which eventually with repeat screenings became a kind of olive, which I re-used and kept adding new little blobs of yellow and purple to it at the top of the screen randomly.  More yellow got into the mix than purple because I wanted the leaves to “glow”, and loved how the streaks of yellow accentuated this effect.
I had to cut two identical paper stencils because I did it in two lots, the first length of fabric in class and the second at home.  My second effort (at left in the picture below) clearly has a much better alignment! haha hardly surprising, that!  and this time, remembering the difficulties I had with cutting pattern pieces from my poppies print, I tried as much as possible to print right up to and over the edges of my fabric pieces.
Something I forgot to mention in my murky blocks post but have found indispensible!! is to draw a large arrow on the back side of the stencil, indicating “this side up” of course!  With designs like mine which are abstract but still directional, having this has saved me several times from making a terrible mistake…

Once both lengths had dried it looked a little dull and I fancied the idea of a random red leaf here and there, both for visual interest as well as to fill in some gaps.  I didn’t use the screen, but just cut a single-leaf stencil from thickish paper and sort of “sploodged” with a small amount of ink on the end of a paintbrush to fill it in.  Because the paper degrades and starts to bleed quickly, I only used each one about three or four times each before needing to cut a new one.  This colour is the leftover, so the same as, my poppies print.

Once all this had dried, I went over with a Sharpie laundry marker and hand-added the leaf stalks in later.
(and, you can see in my first photo, some little pencilled-in crosses between the leaves? these are my alignment guides and will wash out, no worries  🙂

Thoughts:
Not fabulous but getting… somewhere?!  Has some disastrous spots, but overall I eventually wrangled it into something I like.  I already know how I’m going to use it!  Since I’m less happy with this than with my murky block print then paradoxically I will feel less angst-y about slicing into it and sewing it up first… if that makes any sense.  No, I know it doesn’t.  I’m intimidated by fabrics I love more, so am more likely NOT to use them through weird feelings of inadequacy that I can’t do them justice… pretty silly, huh?
Anyway this will get made up quickly… stay tuned!

Well … screen-printing, whoar!  You guys.  I’m totally sucked in.  Somebody stop me!
So yesterday everyone was out except for me … but I had fabric.   I had a design and paint and I had a screen.  I had a big outdoor table, all to myself.
I hopped straight into it.
Luckily I had cooked a massive pot of soup in the morning because I was pooped by the end of the day!
So, this is a five colour design, with two sets of two and three quarters pattern repeats spread over two pieces of fabric.

The fabric is an ivory cotton from Homecraft Textiles.  It is quite tightly woven, crisp and stiff, but it’s not too bad with a quality like a coupla steps up from calico.
I started out by cutting a roughish dress outline, using my tried and true sheath dress pattern Burda 8511, I did this mostly to gauge out the size of the design, how it would look proportionally on a dress.

My design is one that is very forgiving to wonky alignment, even so I think my registration is improving; this time I spent a lot of time carefully measuring and marking key placement spots.  I tacked crosses at the border junctions of each repeat and marked the fabric with pins at the corner points for the screen for each repeat.  I was intentionally going for a more random appearance this time, so with each repeat I purposely moved the screen just a tiny bit this way and that way so the pattern would not be too obviously identical from one repeat to the next.
The colours: I’m such a scrooge and was really economical here! I started out with the palest colour and then continued adding to it to make the subsequent colours.  I only have a little bit of the last colour leftover so this approach really did make the most of my paint.

The pattern repeat, although they each vary slightly:

Thoughts:
Far from perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it.  I like the late 60’s/early 70’s vibe it’s giving me.  These are my earliest years so I’m drawn to this time  🙂
Sometimes, my first print after a colour change is terrible and comes out scratchy no matter how carefully I try to flood the screen.  This happened twice during this project, and also happened with my poppy print.  Meaning that statistically speaking, I have a 50% chance of a good first print, subsequent prints seem to go on more easily, smoothly and cleanly.  So to save myself tears, in the future I’m going to have a sacrificial scrap piece of fabric sitting on the side for that pesky first print.
The colours were supposed to be more transparent; I added what seemed to be heaps of transparency medium to the darker colours! but they are just NOT all that transparent.  Disappointed!  Some of the overlaps have masked the underneath colour completely.  I’m going to check with my teacher a good transparency ratio, or maybe the future I should minimise overlapping of motifs.

So eventually this will be a dress, but not yet.  I’m a-pondering it for a while.
…
With a pensive silence and furrowed brow.
…
It’s funny how easily we can slice into shop-bought printed fabric without a second thought but when it is your very own precious print, cutting into it is terrifying!
For now I’m embarking on a couple of quickie wardrobe fixer-ups, plus now I’ve done this project at home I have to cut some more stencils before my next class… later, dudes! 🙂