Print Off

...kind of like Bake Off or Blast Off! Yesterday I tried a little experiment that didn't work, so this morning I tried it again, see first photo below, and it's kind of working. My idea was to print off one of those deconstructed screens onto black fabric, using bleach gel instead of discharge paste. So yesterday I tried it with Soft Scrub, which I'd purchased without bleach unwittingly, because I wanted to get something that didn't smell so bad. Well, not only did it not work for my purposes, but the product didn't even scrub stains off my bathtub! So I bought some of the stuff with bleach and what you see here is what I've gotten so far. It's still "cooking" but I don't have great hopes. Next time I want to do this with bleach, I'll make thickened bleach, which I know works. I was going for convenience here.

So I totally exhausted one of my three screens yesterday with that ill-fated project. Actually it all looked great on the black raw silk, then it all steamed and washed out. Oh well.

The black photo is of a piece of cotton, printed this morning with the second screen. And after I printed with the bleach gel, I used print paste to get the image just below.

And this last photo was the third screen. Needless to say I made a number of images from each screen and it was great fun doing it. I haven't silk screened since I took a textiles class when I majored in art my first two years of college, like 100 years ago! So this was a great re-learning experience. It took many more passes with the squeegee to get the screen to start printing, than I'd imagined. A couple of my books say it might take 2 or 3 passes, it took me more like 7 or 8. Whatever works.

If you're up for a bit of a political rant, visit my other blog, A Crone's Chronicle, for today's post there.