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! 🙂

Hello!
I am doing a screen printing course!  I have tonnes of pretty patterns gleaned from Pinterest that I would loooove to print onto my own fabric, but I think my aspirations might be a tad more ambitious than my abilities, hehe.  Whatevs, it should be fun and I am finally making use of my screen, bought using a Jacksons gift voucher that was on the point of expiration.  Confession time; this purchase actually took place about seven years ago (eep!) and up until now the screen has been utterly and perfectly pristine and unsullied by anything so messy as actual fabric paint …  perish the thought!  Well, it has at last had its initiation ceremony  🙂
I decided to start with something simple; my first effort is a stylised field of poppies.  The screen print component is a imperfect grid of wonky red dots, like a really lovely Nano Iro pocho dots pattern that I saw for $50/m in a local shop which shall remain nameless.  Ah, the joys of living in Perth…. hey, I’m all for supporting local businesses and have got nothing against someone making a living, but a line has to be drawn somewhere.  $50/m is overstepping somewhat, no?!
I used a lightweight white cotton from Spotlight, and mixed a deepish but still quite intense red/orange, like the colour of a, well the colour of a poppy!  The break-down is about two thirds mid orange (which I would describe as garishly, in-your-face, “life jacket” orange), a third new mid red (which I would describe as “crimson”) and the tiniest touch of black.  I added about 10% transparency medium but I don’t think this quantity was enough to make any difference.  After it had dried I went over and manually added a black dot in the middle of each orange dot using a Sharpie laundry marker.
“Registering the print”, which is printer’s speak for lining up the screen so that repeat designs sit seamlessly alongside each other and you are not supposed to be able to tell where one stops and the next starts; is a heck of a lot harder than it appears… my nine prints are laughably misaligned.  I think though that since my design is random and intentionally wonky it can almost get away with having a less than perfect line-up.
This fabric to appear in sewn-together garment form very soon… stay tuned!