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.
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.
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.
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.
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!