Random Thoughts

Couture: Glow

Funnily enough, all the ink boxes have the same printed instructions no matter what kind of ink is in the box. And I have two kinds of ink: Regular and “SuperCover”. And the latter apparently works better with a coarser silk (i.e., lower monofilament nylon thread count).

This one is printed with the same thread count I’ve been using all the time, and it’s a”glow” yellow, and it seems to print just fine. Perhaps it would have been more opaque if I had the right silk, though? I should try that, as soon as I find somebody that sells the right kind of monofilament.

My squeegee technique is improving, though. Practice makes slightly less worse.

Hm… On the one hand, “Each range includes 8 “Glow” fluorescent colours “. On the other hand, “GLOW COLOURS – Its important to note that Glow only refers to a bright colour tone Glow colours do not ‘glow in the dark’.”

OK, so it’s fluorescent, but it doesn’t glow in the dark. Check.

Couture: Registering

I thought I’d experiment with printing two colours on top of each other, so I did the most technically difficult thing: Print a white under coat, and then a silver top coat, with the same silk. And a pretty big print.

I printed the white yesterday, and then the silver today. It turns out that this is really difficult. The problem is that fabric expands and contracts. This shirt had contracted horizontally and expanded vertically, so I had to scrunch and pull to try to get it to about the same size as the silk.

As you can see, even after fiddling with it for a quarter of an hour, the results are pretty bad.

So I think if I’m going to attempt anything like this in the future, I’ll have to have to do it faster, so that the fabric doesn’t get a chance to do anything between layers.

But apparently I really botched this print, anyway. Here’s what happened after I put the shirt through the washing machine:

The silver stuff kinda fell off and splattered all over the shirt! Either I didn’t cure it enough (I ironed it for a while, but perhaps it needed more?) or it’s not good silver.

But I kinda like the splatter effect… It’s probably going to fall off all over the place, though.

Couture: Wrestling

I vividly remembered there being lots of great imagery in the Love and Rockets calendars from the late 80s. After just a few hours of looking through boxes, I finally found the 1990 calendar, which features this beauty:

By Jamie Hernandez, and I think that’s probably Rene Titañon. (I’ve been meaning to re-read all of Love and Rockets, but I haven’t been able to make up my mind whether to just read all the issues chronologically, or read either the Beto or the Jamie stuff first… The latter might make it easier to follow the storylines, but it feels weird splitting things up that way.)

So, after scanning, it printed it out with “lp -o fitplot”. And that swapped the orientation, so it’s way wider than I thought it would be.

But I measured it against a t-shirt, and it fits on an XL shirt. I thought it might be fun to have a super-wide print, so I just went with it.

(I ripped the silk (i.e. nylon) off of an old frame — I seem to be unable to wash the emulsion off of the screens. According to the interwebs, I’m either exposing too long or too short, and the Speedball Emulsion Cleaner may be too wimpy. So I’m stapling new screen fabric onto the screen:

Staple staple staple. But that means that I can save the screens, which seems fun…)

I didn’t let the emulsion dry long enough (it rested for three hours), so the bits that had the thickest layer of emulsion was still moist. You can see that at the top, where some of it washed off. Tsk, tsk. Well, lesson learned. Screen-printing isn’t all that much work, but you have to wait a lot for stuff to dry, and I’m kinda impatient. I should probably only do this on weekends where I can start the screen earlier in the day. (But the only room that’s dark enough is the toilet, so I can’t pee while things are drying. *crosses legs*)

I’ll try printing it anyway…

Eurhm. I didn’t notice the extra wash-off in the general boobal area.. Hm… perhaps I can cover that up with some gaffa…

I wanted to experiment with printing dark colours on a black t-shirt, and this seems like an ideal image for that kind of thing. So here we go with dark purple.

Hey, nice! It’s almost illegible, though, so I should do a second shirt in a brighter colour.

But I’ll count this one as a success.

The minimum turn-around for a print is eight hours, apparently. First staple the screen, then put emulsion onto the screen. Then let it really dry for four or five hours. Then expose for 35 minutes. Then wash it with a hose, and let it dry for two hours. Then print, wash the screen and the squeegee, and then cure the print.

Done!

4AD Yearly

After buying the 4AD biography half a year ago (or something), I’ve been planning to read it while listening to everything 4AD has released chronologically. I mean, you have to.

The only problem was that I didn’t have everything 4AD has released. I pretty much had everything between 1984 and 1997, where I began to lose interest.

4AD have been really good about including singles and extras when they re-released earlier albums on CDs, so you can usually get everything that (say) The Birthday Party released on 4AD 1980-1983 by just getting the four CDs. However, there’s a quite a lot of odds’n’ends that haven’t been collected in that manner (like the Rene Halkett/David Jay 7″) and stuff.

So I spent an evening going through the discography for the 20 first years, placing everything chronologically. I had to “break out” the bonus 7″ tracks from the CDs and stuff, but it’s mostly straight-forward. And there’s some judgement involved — I wouldn’t want to listen to all versions of all Gus Gus cd singles, for instance. There’s a lot of remixes, and that would be boring. So just one version of each “release”.

And then I ordered everything I didn’t have from discogs.com. I really like Discogs — people on there are usually smaller businesses, and they have a quite streamlined way to buy stuff. Of course, buying used stuff from Amazon would be even easier, but Amazon is kinda nasty, right? So I stay away from Amazon.

And now I have everything! Everything! I can finally read the book! Yay!

I wish there was I way I could make the chronology available for others to listen to, too, but I don’t really see a way to do that without it being all illegal and stuff.

Useful Consumer Review

Anything that’s wireless doesn’t work.

But there’s degrees of not-working-ness. I’ve had wireless keyboards that drops one in every five keystrokes even though the receiver is only a meter away, and I have keyboards that drop only one in twenty keystrokes over a range of ten meters.

But the most problematic wireless gear is wifi. I had a Netgear Access Point, then a … er, I forget, and then a Cisco one, and they all sucked. I mean, really. None of them could give reliable networking over ten meters through a couple of walls. I ended up with the Cisco two meters away, and I still lost teh webs sometimes.

And then I got this Asus RT-AC68U thing.

The Asus RT-AC68U wifi AP, hiding in a cupboard at the farthest reach of the apartment

By Emacs! What a difference!

I’ve had it for a month now, and my laptop hasn’t lost connection once! And the throughput! And latency! It’s unimaginable! It’s almost like having a wired connection from twenty years ago! It’s fantastic!

I can even sit on the balcony and work! I should use more sunblock! It’s really hot in Oslo this week!

The Eyefi card I’ve got in my camera still can’t get any connection unless it’s less than a meter from the access point. That kinda sucks.

But a huge numbers of thumbs up for the Asus RT-AC68U. It’s the best wireless router in the history of wireless routers.

(This advertisement has not been paid for. Actual router functionality hasn’t been tested; I’m just running it in bridge mode as an access point. May not be applicable to your region.)