screen printing | Tien Chiu's Blog

April 1, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Screen printing on warps

In between chores and shopping for hardwood flooring, I managed to snatch a little bit of time to try screen printing on warps.

Here is what I screen printed on the warp, between the reed and the fell:

And here is what it looks like after weaving and wet-finishing:

I was surprised how little distortion there was overall; the circles are still recognizably circles and the outline of the tiger is definitely tiger-ish: you can even see the stripes in places!

On the whole, though, I think the potential of this technique lies primarily in solid chunks of color (blocks, silhouettes) or in “textural color” – for example, a spatter pattern which gives visual texture but isn’t imagery. The tiger has quite a bit of detail (and would have been more detailed yet had I used plain weave instead of a 2/2 twill) but needs to be bolder to really stand out.

Other thoughts:

There are some clearly visible stripes where the warp threads clumped together and therefore didn’t get printed. (I used fabric paint.) Most obvious in the left hand tiger and the golden sun above it, much less of a problem in the red circles. I’m not sure how to get around this, since the fabric paint needs to be thick enough to screen print. I could mash the warp threads around a bit to get the color to transfer from one thread to another, but that would blur the image. This would probably be less of a problem with thickened dyes.
It would be interesting to try this again with simpler imagery (maybe just circles, no tiger) but a more complex weave structure. The idea fascinates me; I must try it!
There are some splotches of paint, probably because I got impatient and heat-set the paint before the recommended 24-hour period. I’m ignoring them; that’s an easily fixable problem.
The fabric paint definitely stiffens the fabric; it’s not obnoxious, but definitely noticeable.

On the whole, I thought this was an interesting technique with a lot of potential; I plan to experiment with it more seriously after we move. (Currently the loom is over carpet, which means putting drop cloths everywhere if I want to screen print warps; after we move, the loom will be in the garage, and I can make messes with impunity.)

Also in surface design news, I bought two excellent books during a visit to Dharma Trading Company this weekend. The first is Screen Printing: Layering textiles with colour, texture, & imagery by Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan. The second is Finding Your Own Visual Language, by the same two authors plus Jane Dunnewold. Neither of these are dabblers’ books – they are meant for the serious textile artist. Screen Printing discusses the nearly-infinite number of ways you can use a screen to create complex cloth, including some I had never even thought of! – and also includes some notes on composition. Finding Your Own Visual Language looks like my personal Holy Grail – thoughts and exercises on design and composition, written by some very experienced textile artists and going far beyond introductory design principles.

I’ll write more about these books once I’ve had time to read and digest them. Which may not be immediately: we close on the house April 19, and will probably move in mid-May, meaning there is an awful lot of sorting, packing, moving, and supervising-of-contractors to be done over the next few weeks!

March 5, 2012 by Tien Chiu

New wardrobe

I screen printed eight T-shirts yesterday, of which this is my favorite (click in for a closeup!):

my favorite: red dragon on a flame-colored T-shirt! — red dragon on a flame-colored T-shirt!

Here is my next favorite:

bordered tiger print on rust-colored fabric

And here are two others I liked:

This one did not come out quite as brightly as I had hoped, probably because my screen printing inks are semi-transparent – meaning the background is apt to show through.

The same thing happened here, but I love it anyway:

And these four are still in progress:

With this one, I intend to discharge the tiger using thickened bleach (more accurately, Cascade dishwashing gel with bleach – more controllable and less likely to bleed), then paint it with thickened dyes to give an orange tiger against a khaki-and-olive shirt. I think that should be really neat!

These two are white and need to be overpainted with thickened dyes to make them more interesting:

Cat perching on a stone ledge. This one's for Sweetheart, who loved to sit on top of things. — Cat perching on a stone ledge. This one's for Sweetheart (who died last year) - she loved to sit on top of things.

Cat with birds. Sweetheart loved chasing birds, too. I hope somewhere she is still chasing them.

The cat with birds is probably the least successful print: the border is a bit blurry on the left side and the cat really doesn’t make sense – compositionally the copper color doesn’t work and who ever heard of a metallic copper cat? I am tempted to toss this one and remake it, this time with a black or dark brown kitty.

The cat-with-birds was a lot of fun to make, though – it involved six Thermofax screens: five small ones for the birds and cat, plus a larger one for the border. And I like the composition, so I will likely redo it.

And here is the last one, which also needs rework:

The least successful print: red dragon on black

Here the semi-transparent inks are super obvious: the red dragon is barely visible as a dark maroon. However, this is probably salvageable. I’m going to discharge the shirt using either thiourea dioxide or bleach, then re-dye with a friendlier color. Maybe a flame-colored halo around the dragon? That would be really neat!

And, finally, I printed a pair of sweatpants – this was my first attempt at Thermofax printing and I just LOVE it, though technically it’s a disaster:

Here is a closeup of one motif (which looks a bit blurry; maybe I should have photographed a better one):

Thermofax printing, by the way, is TREMENDOUS fun, especially when compared to much more laborious silkscreening. Instead of having to laboriously apply emulsion to a screen, wait 24 hours for a screen to dry, then exposing and washing out the screen, you just take your design, sandwich it against the sheet of Thermofax screen, and run it through the Thermofax. Presto, you have a screen! It’s just a minute or two to mount the screen in the frame (which is far thinner and less clunky than a silkscreen frame), and then you can print right away. It is such a joy to use! I haven’t felt this empowered by a tool since I changed from a heavy hybrid bike to a lighter, more agile road bike.

(The only downside to a Thermofax machine is its high cost – “going rate” is about $1000 for a used one and $1500 for a new one – but after much searching, I found one on Craigslist dirt cheap. Woo hoo!)

And, as if that weren’t enough, on the quilting front I dyed 14 more fat quarters – shades of rust and orange as well as relatively solid blue, purple colors. The complete set of fat quarters looks like this:

They were tremendous fun to dye and I definitely plan on doing more, if only for the fun of it! I’m going to order at least 10 yards from Dharma this week with the intent of doing more “art cloth” next weekend.

And, finally, I got started on my foundation-pieced quilt block:

It looks rather garish right now but I think will settle down some once I introduce the blues and blue-purples. The construction looks OK, at least to me.

Karen asked about discharge. There are basically two ways of discharging fabric, cold and hot. Bleach can be used cold, but only works on cellulose fibers (it will destroy protein fibers). Thiourea dioxide (and I think one or two other chemicals) works on either, but requires heat and moisture to activate. Both require a respirator with acid gas cartridges, for safety. (Some people do work outdoors with a fan, but not me.) Bleach needs to be rinsed out and then dunked in a bleach-stopping chemical (the chemical name escapes me at the moment, but Dharma Trading Co sells it as Bleach-Stop) to prevent the bleach from eating the fabric; just rinsing it out isn’t enough. Thiourea dioxide either needs to be used in a pot on the stove (though I do this outdoors with an electric roaster/frying pan/camp stove, see previous notes about fumes) or applied as a paste and then ironed. Not all colors of dye will discharge and some colors shift when discharged, which is why I selected colors of MX fiber-reactive dye that will discharge gracefully.

I’ll write more about discharge when I actually do it, probably next weekend.

What’s next? Well, first I need more materials to work on. I plan to order another ten yards of fabric from Dharma this week, which should give me enough to experiment with next weekend. Second, I have homework from my quilting class, so I’ll spend at least a couple days this week practicing foundation piecing. Third, if I have time, I’ll practice draping muslins. Fourth is the book, which I plan to work on in the early mornings.

I haven’t yet figured out what to do with all this fabric I’m making, since I am not a quilter. I suspect I may make some quilter friend very happy, by donating to their stash!

March 1, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Thermofax triumph!

I installed the new carrier belt yesterday, and Mike helped me fiddle with it until it moved cleanly without shifting. (This took nearly two hours!) I then ran some additional tests on different types of inks, etc. I found that, while I could get good results from pretty much everything, the best results came from a dark gray, laser printed original that had been ironed several times to remove excess toner. After satisfying myself that the screens were almost perfectly clear, I ran the test end-to-end, producing these prints:

See how beautifully the fine lines came out? (The penny gives you an idea of the scale.) And the dark portions are pure blue – except on the muslin, and I think that was user error – it was the last one printed and I was running out of ink, so the dark sections aren’t all filled in. The paper ones look great!

I’m now planning my print run for the weekend. I have five large T-shirt designs picked out, of which these three are my favorite:

(The images all come from various Dover books of Chinese cut-paper designs.)

I had considered doing a multicolor silkscreen for each of these, since I want to “color in” the various sections, but because these are all full-screen prints, doing so would be very expensive. (A single sheet of Thermofax screen costs $3.75 unless you buy in bulk.) Doing all five designs in four colors would be $75 worth of screens! It would also be quite fussy.

So I’ve decided to dye the shirt the color I want, then screen print, then paint and discharge the areas I want to be colored, then paint with thickened dye. This would have several advantages. First, it would give me finer control over color, since my dye samples are quite extensive and my collection of paint colors quite limited. (I’m also not very experienced at mixing paint.) Second, it gives me a chance to practice more surface design techniques, which would be good practice. And third, it’s cheaper!

It will take longer to do things this way – probably two weekends to produce a run of shirts – but I think it will be worthwhile. So that’s the plan.

Meanwhile, there are other fun things to dye! In particular, I want to do the sweatpants this weekend, so I can wear them when working out next week. I’ve decided to dye them black and print various small images on them in gold. I plan to use my running tiger logo (of course!) and do three or four other designs as well.

Socks are a bit harder, because they stretch. I plan to dye them, but probably not silkscreen over the dyed parts. if I do, it will be purely experimental, abstract designs.

And that’s my plans for the upcoming weekend. I may also do some fashion draping, if I have the time and inclination, and am hoping to sneak in some time to work on the book.

February 26, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Thermofax tinkering

Today’s four-color printing got off to a rough start when I discovered that two of my screens were printing very poorly (and suspected that the third and fourth would be worse). So instead of four-color printing, I spent the day troubleshooting the screen burning process, with help from the complexcloth Yahoo group. Eventually I figured it more or less out, and produced a screen which, while not perfect, printed quite well.

Here’s a photo that shows the difference between yesterday and today:

right: yesterday's print. Left: today's print. See how the print is much, much sharper on today's print? — left: today's print. Right: yesterday's print.

Maybe not super obvious in the smaller photo, but if you click in, you’ll see how much better today’s print is. I’m still refining the screen-burning process, but I think I’m getting close enough that I can go back to attempting four-color printing.

Unfortunately, though, that will have to wait until next weekend. Screen printing is messy and takes a lot of space (mostly for drying the printed items), so I prefer to do it outside. Four color printing requires a nice chunk of focused time, and I just don’t have enough daylight to do a print run outside on a work-day. So I will play around with it this coming weekend. (It’s probably just as well; my T-shirts from Dharma Trading Company will have arrived by then, so I’ll have something to print on.)

ME asked if I was planning to weave the dragon. Alas, no. Weaving that kind of detailed portrait requires either an incredible amount of hand manipulation or a jacquard loom, so it’s out of my reach right now. I’m just playing at the moment, and developing skills that will come in handy later. I want to understand more about surface design, and I’m taking advantage of this break from Big Projects to play with different techniques. I may make some “complex cloth” a la Jane Dunnewold’s book, layering different surface design techniques to produce a visually rich fabric.

I have no idea, honestly, whether I’ll use this in my current body of work (which focuses, at least for now, on handwoven couture garments). I need to do some deep thinking about ways in which surface design can be used with handwoven fabrics without overwhelming the woven pattern. But it never hurts to have more tools in your toolbox! and I think I can learn a lot about design by playing with surface design techniques on cloth. Fortunately I have quite a bit of cotton fabric in my stash, so I can play for quite awhile with what I’ve already got.

I’m really enjoying dabbling and tinkering. After nearly a year focused on a single project, it’s nice to take some time “off” and play without any further intent. I’m sure my Muse will start cracking the whip again eventually, especially when a really interesting idea comes up – but meanwhile, I can dabble in this and that.

And, of course, there’s my new hobby: home improvement! Mike and I went to Lowe’s and Home Depot this weekend to investigate flooring, cabinets, and major appliances. We won’t be able to get hard-and-fast estimates until the house is actually ours, but we’re starting to think about what we want done and what we want to buy. Depending on what gets left behind, we might have to purchase a LOT of major appliances, so it doesn’t hurt to think about it in advance.

Off to bed!

February 25, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Just the thermofax, ma’am

I spent a good chunk of today (after a leisurely breakfast, a nap, and a nice walk) playing with the Thermofax. After a couple hours, I got something fairly passable:

Along the way, of course, there was plenty of this:

and even some of this:

I discovered that yes, kiddo, it is possible (and actually quite easy) to overexpose a Thermofax screen, and wasted probably at least $30 worth of screens figuring out what the right exposure was. I’m still not convinced that I have the exposure exactly correct, but it’s passable now, and I’m tired of fiddling, so I think I’m going to move ahead and burn some more screens so I can try four-color printing using registration marks.

(No, I’m not crazy: I’ve done this with screen printing in the past, so it’s just a matter of transferring the technique to Thermofax printing. It shouldn’t be too hard – if I can get the screens burned correctly!)

Anyway, I’ve created this Photoshop simulation of what I’m after:

There are four colors here: the copper clouds, the red dragon, the gold tail/crest of the dragon, and the green eyes and pearl. I’ve separated the colors into different screens, added registration marks (the little + symbols in the corners), so I can line up the screens, and am prepared to try printing tomorrow morning. I have no real expectation of success, and actually not much interest in the finished product – it’s just an exercise in Thermofax printing! But I figure it involves most of the technical skills required for Thermofax printing, so it’s a good thing to start with.

But first, it’s off to dinner! Tonight is date night, and we’re going out for sushi. Yum!