3AM
Couture: Curing
I must be doing something wrong when curing (i.e. heat fixing). Most of the shirts survive washing just fine, but two of them have dissolved.
Hm… it was the metallic and the “glow yellow”. Perhaps they need more curing?
Googling a bit more seems to suggest that curing water based inks with an iron is challenging, since you need to get all the moisture out to get the ink to bond with the fabric properly. Some people recommend using a heat gun. Hm… More stuff to buy, I guess.
Couture: Errata
I remembered that I had a drying cabinet, so I plugged the holes in it (to avoid light leaking in), and suddenly my screen printing process is down to five hours.
Man, that’s some good screen printing.
The image is Errata Stigmata by Beto Hernandez, from that calendar previously discussed in previous editions of this blog previously published previously.
Useful Consumer Review
I thought that getting an EyeFi card for my camera would make blogging easier. I mean, just snap a picture, and then it’s transferred to your computer automatically? Result!
But the range of the wifi in the EyeFi card is pitiful. You have to leave the camera less than a couple of meters from the access point to have it discover the wireless network.
That’s not the worst bit, though. If you snap a picture with the camera elsewhere, it’ll try to create its own ad-hoc network. And then … it apparently tries to connect to it? Or something? This is what the screen says:
And the only way to make it connect to the real network is to switch the camera off and then on again, and then take another picture, and then it’ll try to reconnect to the real network.
Man, that’s pitiful. It would be faster to yank the card and put in into an SD-to-USB card manually.
Like an animal.
In conclusion: EyeFi sucks.
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.