Couture: Mass

Today’s experiment was to wash the emulsion off the screen with cold water, but with higher pressure.  (But putting my thumb over the hose.  Hi-tech.)

It worked very well.  I got no wash-off of the exposed areas, which has been a problem before, when I used luke-warm water.  The only problem is that water was spraying all over the bathroom, so I had to do that naked, or change my clothes a lot.

So.  Naked.

And I wanted to try printing several shirts with the same screen, without washing the paint off the screen in between.  That didn’t work very well.  It seems like the paint is drying and clogging the screen in just a few minutes.  It is like 35C here now, so that may explain it…  Or perhaps I should be thinning my paint.

Anyway.  Results!  Two-sided shirts:

IMG_5673It’s from this beautiful two-page spread by Bruno Richard:

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Useful Consumer Review

When doing screen printing, the only timing sensitive thing is really the emulsion exposure time.  I keep forgetting, so I bought a physical timer to remind me.

I wanted something really simple, but something that didn’t make a tick… tick… noise, so I got this Jacob Jensen thing.

IMG_5670And the user interface is quite nice.  There’s just two buttons — to increase the minutes, and to decrease the minutes.  Great.

However, the viewing angle is really pitiful.  Unless you’re looking right at it, you can’t really read the display at all.

IMG_5671Tsk.

Couture: Colourful

I’m still not doing registered multi-prints, because that’s like hard and stuff, but there are other ways to do colour.

Like:

IMG_5635OK, that’s cheating.  But how about this?

IMG_5636Of course, the problem with just squishing lots of colours down on the screen and squeegeeing is that you can’t do two strokes, so the colours get a bit see-through.  But I’ll wear it anyway.

Time for some new images, though.  I need to buy more silk tomorrow…

Couture: Fans

For each screen, I’m trying to vary things to see whether I can get the turnover time down.  I’m kinda impatient.

This time, I put a fan into the “dark room” toilet where I’m drying the emulsion.  The screens have to be dried horizontally to avoid the emulsion running, so I lifted it up a bit to ensure air flow on both sides.

IMG_5626
State-of-the-art darkish toilet room

I checked it after three-four hours, and it was totally tack-less, which is hours faster than without the fan.

IMG_5627
Drawing by Frank King

While exposing, I forgot the time, and I exposed for 45 minutes instead of my 35 minute target.  But everything worked pretty well, anyway.

However, working with the thinner black ink is proving somewhat challenging.

IMG_5628

I printed this one with one stroke, and it’s too light here and there.  So for the next one, I wanted to do a flood-fill first.

IMG_5629And that let too much ink through.  Way too much. So I should do something … in the middle of those.  Like, one, solid, slow stroke.  Or something.  And apply medium pressure.

Ok, here’s the third attempt:

IMG_5630Much better.  But it’s not perfect.  I’ve gotten some bleed-through to the left of the fringe.  Perhaps I applied the emulsion too thinly?  I did try to get it really even, so perhaps I removed too much…

Whoda thunk that screen printing would be so crafty?