See those cute little eyes (on the dolls that my son designed) - they are screen printed! And no, I don't have any materials for screen printing. The Yudu screen printing system that we bought for NueToMe resides in San Jose with my parents. And I wouldn't have used such a huge screen print for such a small item. So, I looked for another solution.
First of all, this came about because I'm trying to reduce the amount of things that I need to do to help my son make these things. While I do plan on teaching him to sew - sewing around tiny little eyes is not the first skill we will be working on. So, I was looking for an easy alternative. I thought about having him draw every face on to each doll... but knowing my son, he would get tired of that process... besides when we tried this, the ink just wasn't bold enough.
So, painting is what came to mind next. Of course, it's hard enough painting small details on paper - on a fabric, it's 10 times harder. And I wanted to set him up for success, not failure. From the techniques I've learned... screen printing was the answer. But I wanted it to be his size - something manageable.
So today while he spent the day at Art Camp and the rest of the day at his dad's work... I experimented with making a screen printing system that he would be able to do. First, I made a screen from an old frame (it's a 4x6 frame), some silver organza fabric I had (I looked at using tulle - but even my smallest seemed like the holes would be too big... it was also important that I found a fabric that we could see through) and my husband's manual staple gun.
I have to make more of these, so I'll try to do a tutorial on the next one. A few things that didn't go as planned... the staples didn't go all the way in - I got over this as they went in most of the way (and I can hammer them flat later if it becomes a problem); a few of the staples poke out the side because the frame was slightly slanted on the side - again I got over it pretty quickly; and there was a good gap between the fabric and the frame where I wrapped it around - nothing a little packing tape couldn't fix.
I tested it out with Lyssie. I drew the basic outline of Robbie's doll pattern several times on a piece of paper and asked her to give them faces. Then I chose two of them that would be the easiest to transfer on to the screen. I put one face on each end of the screen to utilize the screen a little bettwe.
Using a pen (couldn't find a pencil), I traced around her lines (I had her use a thick marker). I then used
Mod Podge and painted everything that I didn't want to print (so everywhere except for her lines). Some areas took a few coats to be sure that there weren't any pin holes. I let the screen dry in the window for a few hours. I thought it would have to dry overnight... but being impatient, I tried it anyway and it worked great!
I used acrylic (again, too impatient to wait and buy fabric paint) and it printed up perfectly. So, does anyone know if I heat set acrylic if it'll still wash out of the fabric??? I also used a large rubber spatula to push the paint through the screen. Because the face image was small enough... this worked great - and it was easy to control, which will be important when it is my son doing it.
I'm really excited about showing this to my son. I hope he's as excited as I am. I hope to have him spend some time tomorrow drawing out the faces that he'd like to use. I figure I'll make two to three more screens giving him 6 - 8 faces to choose from when he makes these. Oh - and his finger puppets... he'll have to figure out something for the finger puppets as well.
He's still working toward adopting his animal - so I'm hoping he can make up enough these that we can take him to a Farmer's Market to sell them before the end of summer.
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