I finished this pretty little cape on Jan. 1. I had been working on it for a couple weeks, but I finished it the first day of the year.
I made it for my mom from the DROPS 199-17 (short DROPS cape) by DROPS Design, but omitted the ribbon tie. Not really her style; a pin works better. I used Silky Alpaca Lace and the recommended size 8 and 4 needles. It took two full skeins to make the large (middle size in the pattern) size.
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?
Well, not exactly. But it is a giraffe on a purple shirt.
My little buddy (the boy I babysit nearly every day) had his third birthday last month. Two things he is absolutely sure of on a regular basis: his favorite color is purple and his favorite animal is a giraffe.
In addition to a few cars and some stickers, I decided to make him a shirt. Mostly because I couldn’t find any giraffe shirts at Target.
I found a few tutorials online and cobbled together my own screen printing method using curtain fabric, an embroidery hoop, and some handmade stencils.
It worked well for the yellow base coat of the giraffe’s body, but not exactly for the spots.
The paint didn’t exactly go through the tiny holes. It frustrated me a bit, considering it took so long to cut out every single spot, but it gave me a good basis to paint on the spots that didn’t come out by hand.
I painted the outlines, eyes, and leaves as well because by that point I didn’t want to mess with the home-made screen anymore. The curtain fabric was not rigidly woven enough and it started creating large holes. Painting ended up working pretty well.
Have you ever tried to silkscreen this way? Anyone else like to throw in a hand-made present along with (or in lieu of) store-bought ones?
Casey Kay B 