This is kind of a weird picture, because it’s a selection of the tee shirts that I silkscreened my crow onto. I’ll post pictures of the crow later, a close up and some cards that I did.

This is actually a new image, not the same crow that I did earlier. I had done the earlier silk screen, but wanted to use the silkscreen for another project, so I washed off all the resist. Sadly, the screen turned out to not be large enough for the other project, so I cleaned it for naught. I ended up doing another silkscreen on that silk, which I’ll talk about in another post.

Fortunately, my dad had a hand-made silkscreen frame he’d made for printing decals for his model airplanes. His silk had resist on it that was probably ten years old, so I had to buy a length of new silkscreen silk, which was fine by me. New silk is better than used silk, because sometimes not all the resist comes off.

To make this crow design, I traced a proof of the crow I’d silkscreened earlier. I traced it twice, one facing right and one facing left, and then painted over both of them with drawing ink. The resist overlapped more than I wanted, and one of the birds got ruined, but this one was still mostly usable. After I was done, I printed crows on everything that didn’t have a crow on it, including some new shirts I got on sale at Target. I also printed in red ink on my dark tee shirts, because the black didn’t show up. It took the better part of two weeks to silkscreen everything, because I did both sides. This isn’t even all of the shirts, because some of them were in the laundry.

I didn’t feel much like throwing this class session, so I decided to try some alternative pottery ideas. This is one of them. My friend had some plastic embossing strips for ceramic artists, and she used them to make a cool mug. I made this mug, which didn’t turn out quite as cool because there was some separation at the bottom and now it won’t hold water.  So now it’s a pen holder.

I made a new silkscreen of a nearly identical crow this week.  Today I silkscreened them on to my remaining tee shirts. I think I have a lot of tee shirts.  After this, I was supposed to iron them for 3-5 minutes on each side to set the ink.  This ended up kind of scorching the fabric.  Instead, I put them in the craft oven at about 275 for ten minutes. Still smelled a little scorched (like a high-heat dryer) but I hope it set the ink.

After I finished silkscreening my tee shirts, I wanted to see if I could use blockprinting ink on the silkscreen.

I had to wash the silkscreening ink off, and it specifically said that you mustn’t have any ink on the silk or you would ruin it, so I scrubbed fiercely.  I didn’t realize that the ink stained, and that part wouldn’t come off, so I ended up scrubbing some of the resist off. There were pinholes in it after I washed it. I also ended up washing loose the adhesive on the masking tape, so I had to use a paper as a block for the top of the card.

I did manage to answer the question that Google couldn’t answer for me, namely, “Can you use blockprinting ink on a silk screen?”  In a word: yes.  However, my first few prints had too much ink, and the images became unpleasantly smeared and dotted on the left side of the image.  These later ones are fine for cards, I think. They have an interesting fabric texture on them, and I like the inconsistency.

I often wear tee shirts, and almost all of my shirts have no logo or design on them at all.  Usually, that’s the way I like it.  However, I’ve been toying with the idea of having a design on my shirts.  A crow, naturally, since I like them so much.

I bought a silkscreening kit at Michael’s that came with a stencil and some fabric ink.  I didn’t want anything simple enough to be put on with a stencil, so I also bought the drawing and resist kit.  I thought about doing the photo emulsion kit, but this was cheaper. Besides, I wanted to do my own design, and I figured that drawing it directly on the silk would eliminate at least one step.

For those of you trying this at home, let me assure you that the drawing medium is not the easiest to work with.  It doesn’t want to get nearly as fine as I wanted it.  You have to brush it on, so fine lines are out of the question.  Still, I was able to paint this little crow onto the silk.  After you paint it on and let it dry, you squeegee the resist over the surface. I didn’t want to use an entire bottle of resist, so I blocked out some of the screen with masking tape.

After the resist dries, you run it under water until the drawing ink washes out.  At this point, it’s pretty much ready to go.  By applying a single pass with the ink, I was able to make pretty good prints onto my tee shirts.  I did a run of eight shirts, and then the ink started to get too viscous.

One problem I had was that the line at the top of the beak got covered over with resist, and therefore didn’t show up when I did the print.  Also, the later prints looked faded near the tail.  I used a paintbrush to touch up these areas. They have a handmade look, which I do not consider a defect here.

The directions say that you must heat set the image for 3-5 minutes on each side with an iron. I did that, but found that the cloth I used over it got scorched.  We’ll see how well it washes.