Playing With Screen Printing

One of my goals this year was to take a class and learn a new skill. I signed up for Lyric Kinard's screen printing class at Quilt University. The class has been going for 4 weeks now and yesterday I finally had time to do some of the exercises. I spent about 6 hours playing and had some good and not so good results...... lets focus on the good.....

This first picture is a print created from a freezer paper stencil that I created and ironed to the back of the screen. I used Speedball fabric screen printing ink and this good print was after several tries. It was a lot harder to get the thick paint through the screen than I thought it would be.

When I tired of this, I carefully peeled the freezer paper off of the screen and put it paint side up on my work surface. I then put a piece of white PDF fabric on top and pressed it into the paint. I really like the results and didn't waste the paint.

This next print is from a thermofax screen using Lumiere paints and it was much easier to print.

I used the thermofax screen and overprinted my tree. I like this too.

Next I did another freezer paper stencil and used craft acrylic paint thinned with fabric medium for the print. This took several tries also and the paint was a little too thin to get a crisp image.

Again when I finished I carefully peeled off the freezer paper and put a piece of fabric over it to get this image. I love this one.

This next exercise was something I had read about on the ride back from Florida. (the book I was reading is 'Water-Based Screen Printing Today') I drew directly on the screen with water soluble crayons. In the picture you can see the white fabric medium that I flooded the screen with to get the print.

At first some of the thicker crayon markings acted as a resist until it got wetter as I continued to print. I really like this also and got about 5 good prints out of the screen. Each is a little different since the paint kept dissolving into the fabric. I can't wait to try this again.

In this last exercise I put a stencil under the screen and used a bleach pen to print. This fabric is a very flat black and I love the color of the discharge. It was really easy using the stencil and I recently found 4 very nice ones marked down to $3 each at my local quilt shop, Red Hen Fabrics.

As you can see I really had a fun day.