Yesterday evening we finally picked up my screens from the workshop and ever since then I’ve been super impatient to get started. Sadly, this morning I had to go to work, forcing me to wait even longer. Finally when I got back this afternoon, I set everything up, following the notes I had taken when my sister was here a few weeks ago. Next I picked which bags I wanted to print on, as well as which images I wanted to use first. Then I mixed my paint, as I wanted a slightly different blue than what I received. Before printing directly onto cut out sections of actual bags, I practiced on some paper as I didn’t want to ruin anything. Sadly this is when things started going wrong. I’ll tell you one thing, it certainly isn’t as easy as it looks.
New silk-screen printing set-up: the screen is clipped on to a hinged bit of wood so that it can be lifted easily.
New silk-screen printing set-up: with a few on my images.
- New silk-screen printing set up: with everything set and ready for printing.
Luckily I could skype my sister, a master printer, for help. Everything she said, helped. The first problem was a simple one, I had been doing it too slowly, as a result the paint would smudge. So I started doing it quicker and using the squeegee at a better angle, and straight away the images started looking quite good. The screen was very sticky though, making it difficult to use, which she said was rather strange. But we didn’t think more of it as the images were looking ok. So, I moved on to a bit of scrap material, again not to ruin anything important. You could barely see the image on the material, but at least there was no smudging. She suggested adding more pigments into the paint. So I removed all the paint from to screen in order to mix in more pigments. It was when I was cleaning off the screen that things went wrong. Basically the whole image started ripping off. She said that that was really NOT normal, and that it sounded like the image hadn’t been ‘cooked’ enough onto the screen… She suggested putting them out into the sun for a day or so to ’cook’ it further. This means that I have to wait longer 
What annoys me though is that I paid the girl to do these for me, but I don’t think that I have the patience to get her to redo the whole screen again seeing as it already took so long (near a month) to get these done. On top of that it was my favourite image, one that I had drawn myself. Let’s hope the weather is sunny tomorrow so that I can hopfully start in the afternoon. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
