Adventure Quilter

Now, THIS is exciting stuff!  After doing deconstructed screen printing with randomly created screens, I decided to draw on my last screen, with a syringe.  This is a technique I learned in a DSP class with Kerr Grabowski.

That’s my screen above.  I drew on it with very thick black dye.  In fact, it was actually too thick and it came out in glops and curly-Qs.  None of which mattered for my purposes.

And here’s the first pull with that screen. You can barely see the clear dye paste I used on the far right.

Is that cool or what?  Some of the dried dye in the screen has dissolved with the print paste and has given a little gray color. But, the heavy black lines are thick enough to act as resists and they’ve created white lines.  Not what you’d expect, right?

The first few pulls with colorless paste looked somewhat similar.  Here’s a more detailed shot.

Before I show you the rest of my results, here’s more of an overview, using Gabriele DiTota’s work as examples.  She was our ring leader for the day and she got some great results.  Here are her first few pulls with her syringe-drawn screen.  (She was smart enough to thin the black dye paste so she avoided the gloppy curly-Qs.)

After a few of these colorless pulls, she switched to red dye.

The red dye colored the background, but the drawn squeegee lines still created a resist resulting in white lines.  Pretty cool, right?

Like Gabriele, I decided to add a background color to my efforts.  I was aiming for blue-green, but I initially got mostly green.  As I slowly added more blue, I pulled screen after screen, resulting in a run of blues and greens.

Below you can see the detail of the first couple of pulls on the left and later colored ones on the right.  As you can see, the drawn design is beginning to break down on the right and the details are fading.  No worries.  It’s just a different design.

I got carried away and added a bit too much black to the one on the far right.  The fabric is wet in this photo, so it looks especially vibrant.

And here’s the full run, washed and dried.  As you can see, it lost a lot of color in the wash, but I still love it!

A super close up.

I LOVE these results!  If I ever do DSP again, I think I’ll do this sort of drawing on all my screens!

Now, what will I do with all this luscious fabric?  That shouldn’t be a problem!

Ellen Lindner

I recently got to play with deconstructed screen printing again, and I got some pretty cool results.

The process is easy, but it also involves a fair amount of dyes, equipment, and set up.

Here’s a brief video overview.

You start by purposely allowing thickened dye to dry in your screen.  A random design is created by putting various textured things under the screen when adding the dye.  The texture creates puddles and such, which hold the colored dye in a pattern.

Here’s my red screen.  When creating it, I put rubber bands, a strip of corrugated cardboard, bubble wrap, and plastic grid underneath the screen. Can you see how the various textures made the dye build up in interesting patterns and thicknesses?

Next, you pull colorless dye paste through the screen.  This causes the dried dyes to break down and to color the fabric in interesting ways.  But, each pull is different, because the dye design is being broken down (deconstructed) each time.

These are the first 3 pulls using the red screen above.  Number 3 has been inverted.

I continued on until there was not much of a pattern left, eventually printing only part of the screen.

All my red fabric.

Here’s my oh-so-boring blue screen.  It was made with a heavy crocheted tablecloth scrap, and a doily (I think.)

Surprisingly, it printed pretty well.

Not happy with the stark contrast of white with one color, I decided to over paint/over dye everything.  I got a little carried away with this one, making the green dye darker than I intended. I was philosophical, though.  I knew I could use green fabric as easily as blue.

I over painted the red with a variety of orange, rust, brown, etc. Not bad, I thought.

A detail shot.

I think these fabrics will be useful.

The red fabric held it’s color well, even when rinsed four times and washed once.  But, look at the blue!

What happened to the blue, you ask?  That’s what I’d like to know.  Clearly, that dye was weak for some reason.  And what about the reds spots above?  Did I accidentally get red dye on it?  Nope.  It appeared during the rinse and wash process.  I’m guessing there was some red in the yellow dye that I used to create green.  So, unexpected results, but a usable piece of fabric, nevertheless.

One other thing.  Dye is harder to remove from skin than paint.  Ask me how I know.

The designs for this screen printing were all random.  In my next post I’ll show you what happened when designs were drawn on the screen.  They all turned out really great!

Ellen Lindner