No Sewing today. Guess I’ll print
My plan was to spend the day sewing. Alas. The accumulated lint and gunk in my sewing machine was telling me to change plans – take the machine in for its annual-or-so maintenance and cleaning – and then do something else.
A bit of screen printing turned out to be the plan.
I have a specific project in mind. A quilt that’s a work-in-progress requires a section of trees. I have already printed it, but I’m not sure the colors are working right. I’d like to have another option.
I began with background. Blue-blue-blue.
This yardage was painted wet with acrylics on natural muslin. (Partially wet fabric and pretty wet paint.) I worked it fast with a natural sponge. I love the way hand painted fabrics are not flat but have wonderful, random variations.
Next I mixed up some teal for the background trees. There won’t be a lot of contrast between this teal and the blue background.
This might be a problem if there were only going to be two colors. But, the teal is only the first color I’ll print and it will stay in the background. Even so, I mixed in just a tad of white in my teal color so that it would show up against the blue background.
Time to print
The screen placed in the first position for printing
The screen in the next printing position.
Now that it’s printed I think these colors are beautiful together. I hope to remember this when I’m planning a palette for another project.
A note about my screens: There are all kinds of ways to get an image into a printing screen. This one is a photographic image: best for fine detail. I simplified the photo I took, saved it as a digital file and ordered a thermo-fax screen. I get them from Lyric Kinard in North Carolina. https://lyrickinard.com
An important hint for artmakers: When you screen print with acrylic paints, be sure to have your soaking tray for the used screen very close by so you can get the screen in there right away. Acrylics dry FAST! This little tray keeps things wet till I can take things outside to the garden hose for thorough wash-up.
Here are the screens floating in the wash tray.
For the second color I mixed up a pale cream (Lots of white plus a tad of yellow and raw sienna. I chose this to go with the other sections of the project-in-progress.)
The pale cream is so much stronger in contrast than the teal. The teal tree now almost disappears. For this application, that will be fine. It will function as a subtle additional layer.
Sometimes it is frustrating to find that something that you printed and you like gets overtaken by a next step. But, the time spent on that intermediate step is just about always worth it. The final project will benefit form the additional texture and subtle parts.
Now that I’m done, I’m not sure this piece will work in my project-in-progress. But I am sure it will work in some other project. I’ll just have to give the ideas time to cook for a while.
My wonderful sewing repair shop will have my machine back to me tomorrow, and I’ll be back in action for the original sewing plan.
Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi
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