Last week was a whirlwind! Printing printing printing. Making acetates, coating screens, shooting screens, blasting out emulsion, test prints, real prints, upset prints, happy prints. Whew. What a week.
I have learned some things about screen printing and myself. One, it is important for your acetate to be perfectly opaque or else blasting the emulsion out of your screen is a huge pain because you accidentally partially expose parts of the screen that you want to be see through. Two, Kelsey hates blasting out partially exposed screens. Lesson learned and applied to the next project. Three, Kelsey gets grumpy on test print day because colors and fabrics don't always work exactly how she imagined. Four, if Kelsey pushes through this grumpy phase and continues to experiment with colors without throwing in the towel, she will (within 24 hours) end up with fabric she is pleased with. Five, mother and sister are great repositories for test prints and bits of fabric Kelsey never wants to see again.
The bowl print was one of those moments when I wanted to just say "win a few, lose a few," and burn the test prints without looking back. However, I'm glad I didn't! After some rough and funky test prints on mint that I deemed "messy, horrible, and ugly" (Taylor says that was a bit of an overreaction) and then some kind of blah beige on grey prints, (people actually agreed with me on that one), I decided I would just mix up some crazy red ink and see what that turned out like. Voila! Pushed through + experimented = fabric I'm pleased with! I went in the next morning and printed more red fabric as well as some navy blue bowls, and now I am happy. Wouldn't these be cute as tea towels?
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| mint test print |
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| beige on grey |
