…screen printing experiments…

If there’s one thing I love, it’s diving into new creative medium. For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to try screenprinting, so when my family was looking for Mother’s Day present ideas. it was top of my list. What I didn’t factor in was space to spread out and allow things to dry without children or kittens interfering. Unfortunately for me, it was a discovery made too late, when my first run of prints ended in disaster, ink everywhere, skewed prints, grumpy me. I put it all back on the shelf, waiting for summer and longer days to make it easier to get a good chunk of time to print and dry.

A couple of weeks back, I signed up for Paige Evans newsletter, to score a free cut file. It struck me as being perfect for a tshirt print. The original plan was to remove the main print and leave the negative as a stencil. That idea fell over almost as soon as I started weeding – all the tiny inset pieces had no intention of staying in place. Never fear, says I. I’ll weed it as a normal piece, and use it as a stencil for screen filler.

The screen filler idea would have worked, except I spilt some filler over the design, and didn’t realise it was pooled underneath until I tried – and failed – to pull a clean print. I cleaned off the screen and put it all aside. While I had the Cricut out over school break, I printed another stencil, and yesterday, after blogging about how my mojo was gone, my contrary brain was of course motivated to actually get stuck in. In between school and housewifing, I managed to get the screen filled, and then yesterday afternoon, pulled the prints. It turned out as cool as I’d expected.

Kind of ironic, really, isn’t it, the amount of overthinking that went into a shirt that says “hold on let me overthink this”! I am nothing if not on brand, I guess…