Random Thoughts

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.

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

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.

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.

And 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:

Much 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?

I’ve only printed onto black shirts so far.  And now I’m out, so I’m doing a white shirt.

I’m using a new can of emulsion, and that clears up all the problems I was having with peeling.

The main difference between printing on lighter fabrics (as opposed to black fabrics) is that you have to print out your transparencies as “positives” instead of “negatives”.  On black fabrics you’re printing the white bits, while on a white fabric you’re printing the black bits.

The black ink is a lot more viscous than the inks I’ve been using on black fabrics:

So I pushed through too much ink.  I should have used a single pass, I think.  The black ink covers a lot better than the other inks.

I then tried printing with a green ink.  It had the same consistency as the black ink, so I just did one pass, and I didn’t flood-fill the screen first:

Much better.

Even though the screen printing is going swimmingly, I thought it might be fun to try a  transfer thingie again.  But this time in A3 instead of A4.

I googled a bit, and a store strangely called yolö seemed like a likely supplier.  So I got a 25-pack of transfers, and printed out an image.

These work pretty much like the ones I tried earlier.  You print out into a plastic substrate that you then separate from the paper backing, and then you melt the plastics onto the fabric.

Peeling these are easier said than done.  No matter how I tried to separate the plastics from the paper with my nails, I only managed to tear the paper.

Finally I got out an X-Acto knife and managed to wedge it between the plastic and the paper.  And then it was easy to tear it off and iron it onto the shirt.

It’s survived a washing, too, so it seems pretty swell. But they really should have used higher-quality backing paper to make it easier to handle.

For a transfer.

I don’t really have the set-up to do multi-coloured prints where things are in perfect register.

But I thought that since this screen had clearly separated areas, then I could just mask stuff off, and print each thing separately (or “separately”) with different inks.

The colours in the logo aren’t printed perfectly, because of the aforementioned flip problem, so I didn’t get a sufficient amount of ink through the screen.  But I’m gonna call this a success, anyway.  Hah!

I’ve been having serious problems getting the emulsion to expose properly the last couple of days.  I’ve had four screens ruined — peeling and stuff.  I tried varying the drying period, the exposure length, and the heat of the water I use to wash the emulsion off with.

Then I remembered the emulsion can saying something about not lasting forever.

Sure enough, after mixing, it’s supposed to work for four weeks at room temperature.  And this blow shows that I started making shirts on June 6th, which is more like six weeks ago.

Oops.

Time to mix up a new batch.  And stick it into the fridge.

I did manage to make a last couple of screens from that can, though, but washing the unexposed bits off was a chore.  But it turned out pretty nice:

And I got a hot air gun to do the curing with.  I’m not quite sure how long to cure, but I gave it a couple of minutes on 300C, and it certainly feels dry.  I hope I’ve not over-cured it — that can apparently make the print brittle.