Random Thoughts

While waiting for the screen printing equipment to arrive, I’ve been experimenting a bit more with Inkodye.  Because of reasons.

Here’s an extreme close-up of a shirt exposed with a “normal” over-head projector (OHP) transparency:

The white area with pebbled red spots is supposed to be totally white, but because the OHP transparency is so “pebbly”, there’s tons of tiny white holes where it’s supposed to be totally black.  And the result is pretty bad.

But then I got “digital negative” transparencies.  These are for sale only in photo speciality stores, and are more expensive.  But the result is a lot better:

No pebbling, so no orange spots where it’s supposed to be totally white.  I did screw up the print, anyway, because the shirt bunched up a bit.

One of these days I’m going to make an Inkodye shirt that looks almost usable.  Although how usable a white t-shirt is…

I couldn’t make sense of my problems with screen printing the shirts.  Either too much ink or way too little ink.  So I watched a couple of youtube howtos.

I’ve been using the wrong type of squeegee!

There’s one with hard-ish edges for printing onto paper, and there’s one with rounded edges for printing onto fabric, and I was sold the wrong kind.  I’ve now ordered the right kind.

Until that arrives, I can’t experiment further with screen printing, so I thought I’d give Inkodye another whirl, just for fun.

I rolled the dye over the shirt, and gaffaed a transparency to it.

I gaffaed a second on top of the first.  I’m not sure that’s necessary, but because the printer prints out kinda gray-ish blacks on transparencies, I thought it might make sense.

Out on to the balcony for 20 minutes for some sunshine.

OOPS!  The sun went away.  HOW DID THAT HAPPEN!?

Oh.  I should have looked up.

Hm…  but the dye almost looks finished…  Just an area around the shoulders that looks under.  I’ll just have to leave it out there until those turn, too.  Which might take an hour unless the cloud cover thins out.

If it starts raining it’s a wash.

Tee hee.

Uhm…   the whiteness around the shoulders turned out to be condensation and not too little expo…  expo…  sun. I think I’ve over-exposed the ink:

Or the transparency is bad.  Or both.  Well, into the wash and see what comes out…

That’s a very foamy detergent the Inkodye came with…  Or perhaps I used too much.  Anyway:

Way over-exposed, and it appears that the gaffa lets light though?  Hm.  Well, the next one should be perfect, right?

For my second attempt, I tried using less ink, but that made it necessary to squeegee over the silk several times before I pressed it onto the fabric to give it a last squeeg.

And that obviously pushed too much ink through the screen, so things filled in too much.

So:  More ink, and just a single pass.