DIY T-Shirt Screen Printing
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Screen printing our t-shirts.
I’d like to elaborate a little bit on the process in case anyone else is considering doing the same. We had the screen made (to save money on screen and photo emulsion) by a local art store. They used one of their old, somewhat damaged screens to give us a break on the price. We then bought Speedball Opaque Fabric paint. It was around $8 for each 32 oz container of paint. We purchased gold, blue, red, and white. A squeegee added another $8 or so to our bill. (Careful, if you’re printing on black shirts you MUST buy opaque paint!) As you can see in the video, we used a weird screen printing technique. Instead of dragging the squeegee across the screen on the shirt, we would cover the stencil on the screen in a very thick layer of paint. This is because our cheaply made screen was uneven in how well it allowed paint to go through. The unevenness in the screen resulted in a lot of time wasted. We often had to hose down painted t-shirts to remove paint after a mistake had been made, dry them, iron them, and then try again. I suppose that the moral of the story is that if you make your own shirts, try not to save too much money on your screen!
PS: If anyone is wondering more about where we bought our equipment…
we bought our black t-shirts at Corporate Apparel Unlimited, our screen printing supplies at the Utrecht Art Supplies store in downtown DC, and the skull design was generously contributed by Marc Harkness.
This entry was posted by mike on December 15, 2009 at 4:28 am, and is filed under Band and life. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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