Random Thoughts

Screen printing is lots of fun, but I’m getting bored with it now.  And having the floors covered with equipment and brown paper gets old after a month.

So I’m calling it quits for now.

I’d like to have said that I was really good a printing now, but I’m not.  My results are very uneven.  Every other screen turns out unusable, and when printing, about one third of the shirts look kinda not-as-intended.

But for every shirt, I felt like I was getting better.

Just not actually good.

I do love the successful shirts, though.  I’ve been wanting to have those images on a t-shirt since almost before I was a teenager.

And now I have!  So I can finally return to Gmane and Gnus stuff, and get a grip on the outstanding queue of stuff I Really Should Get Around To Doing.

At least after the music festivals are over in a week or two.

For my final (I think) prints, I’ve selected a couple of Charles Burns drawings.  I wanted to experiment with multi-coloured, but “non-registered” prints.  That is, prints that don’t require sub-millimeter precision:

Instead I just mask off areas with tape and print the same screen several times.  That means that I have to wash and dry the screen between each colour, but I don’t have to do two exposures.

Look at the colourful result!  Perhaps a bit too colourful.  I should have experimented more in The Gimp with combinations.

But: Success.

I’m still not getting a totally consistent production line.  I printed a large Krazy Kat image, and after exposing it, it washed off fine.  Except at the end, where I washed a “w” off I wasn’t supposed to.

So I cut a new one from packing tape and stuck it on.

The result was fine:

But still odd.  Perhaps I’m not letting the emulsion dry for a sufficient amount of time?  This dried for like four hours…

I’ve been washing off the screens in the bath tub.  The paints are water-based and rinse off pretty easily, but it’s annoying having to wash off any spatters.

So I’ve been looking for a big washing tub with an outlet that I could place directly over the outlet in the bath tub.  And I’ve been unable to find any.

Then, today, it struck me that I do have a drill, and big plastic packing crates are easy to find.

Duh.

I wanted to screen-print onto the sleeves of a shirt.  It turns out that’s not trivial:

When the fabric is bumpy (the seam down there), the screen doesn’t make contact properly with the fabric, which makes the print crappy.

So I need something soft-ish under the shirt to ensure proper contact with the screen.  Something rubbery, perhaps…  I’m not quite sure what, but I’ll visit a hardware store tomorrow and see if I find something.