After my attempt at screen printing using curtain material and stencils, I decided to make myself an actual printing screen. I went on eBay and found some screen mesh and stopped by Home Depot for a 2×3. After quite a bit of struggle getting the frames cut (hand sawing is exhausting), including a bit of help from my mom using the jigsaw to cut the boards lengthwise, I finally have 2 (or one and a half, considering one doesn’t have a screen on it yet) printing frames.

I decided to break it in with a t-shirt project for church. We aren’t a very big church, so there’s no money in the budget for making shirts for events. I chose to make some shirts that can be used at any event we hold.

Instead of stencils, since I was doing letters, I used Drawing Fluid to block out the words for printing.

After laying down the drawing fluid, I used the screen filler to cover it over. Once it was dry, I used the shower hose to clean out the drawing fluid.

I watered down some fabric paint to create an ink consistency.

I had already dyed the shirts, red and blue for the women’s and red for the men’s. I just printed the fronts and backs over a few days (having to let everything dry takes a while, especially since I only had enough card boar to go inside half the shirts at a time).

Though a few of them came out slightly different from others in terms of printing, They still came out very well.

Anyone else like screen printing? Have you ever tried to make something without power tools that turned out to be way too difficult?