Tag Archives: Own Design

My latest screen-printing project  🙂
Searching for design inspiration, I randomly set myself a theme.  The beach!  I sketched out several ideas and variations, some abstract some more literal, and spent ages agonising over which one I should do… aaargh, so indecisive!!  Eventually settled on this very simple and abstract one, obviously! since we are really pushed for time and space in our class and it’s best not to to turn up with very ambitious ideas.  I had to finish this one at home since I only managed to get halfway through in class.  But I am seriously considering setting up at home to print at least one of my other beach-related ideas too.
I used a lovely lightweight cotton/linen from Spotlight, in a soft sandy shade.  This is probably the nicest, classiest fabric I have printed so far.  It was scary, but I felt ready to take a risk.
The colour palette (6 colours) :

The dots are all printed using the same imperfect circle template, but oriented different ways so they don’t look identical to each other.
Funny moment; my friend J, with whom I am doing the class, on seeing my stencil “um, it’s a hole?”
When printing I tried to vary the visual texture of the dots; at times I did a scanty pull, to get scratchy dots, at other times I put together blobs of slightly different shades of the colours without mixing properly, to get streaked or blotchy dots.

Before class, I cut out all my pattern pieces and tacked an accurate 11cmx11cm grid all over each piece.  When printing the dots I placed the screen just slightly off every now and again, because I like how a little imperfection makes the design look more casual and fun.  Plus, wonky designs are the beginner screen-printer’s best friend!!

The whole shebang…

Thoughts: I am super happy with how the print turned out! and am pretty excited to see how the final garment will look.  I’m motivated to sew it up quickly, because my teacher specifically asked me to show it at our next class.. which will be our last!  Yes, I’m a little sad that my weekly class is going to end, but this isn’t going to be the end of my screen-printing adventures, that’s for sure!

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! 🙂

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!