Or was it?

Last fall, I took a printmaking class through CCDE at my very own university and became intrigued by the art of screen printing. Soon after, I picked up an amazing book called Printing by Hand by Lena Corwin from the public library and after renewing it a number of times, finally decided to spring for the $25 to own the thing.

I've tried the stencil method of screen printing (which you can read about in my post here), but am still a bit daunted by the prospect of photo emulsion screen printing. A happy medium (no pun intended!) is the screen filler method, which I decided to try out recently.

The project: Printed tea towels
Supplies: Purchased tea towels from IKEA, screen drawing fluid, screen filler, fabric screen printing ink, a silk screening frame, plus all the basic supplies for screen printing (squeegee, scraper, plastic spoons, patience, and time!)

My idea was to make a tea towel set; one with an imprint of "easy as pie" and the other with an imprint saying "piece of cake". I didn't draw the images myself, rather I just found images I liked online and picked a font that I thought would look good on tea towels. I printed them out and taped the first pattern to the back of the screen to trace.


Once traced onto the screen, I used a fine paintbrush and screen drawing fluid to paint the image onto the back of the screen.


Once the screen drawing fluid was dry, I went over the entire image with screen filler. Then I let that dry overnight.

Once the screen filler is completely dry, I ran the screen underwater and watched the drawing fluid dissolve and voila! You have your image prepared.


Then the fun part begins: mixing your ink, doing the final prep on the screen, setting up your workspace and doing a few test prints. The "easy as pie" towels turned out great.


A few days later, I started working on the cake towels. I must have had beginners' luck on the first batch, because the second set turned out to be a lot more difficult and after a number of test prints, the image wasn't coming out clearly. I decided to wash the screen after attempt number one and try again later.


Unfortunately, the second attempt was no "piece of cake" either, and I ended up having to scrap the idea of a producing set of tea towels.

But I love the ink colour!

Luckily, I'm left with enough good pie towels to give one to each of my faithful blog readers (you know who you are!)

Merry Christmas!