Cushion the Blow

A good seller in the shop this week has been cushions that I've stitched up with my screen prints on. For me this is great as I'm getting my art work straight into peoples homes and keeping them comfy too haha. I had a good day of sewing yesterday so here are a few more I've made and some cheeky extra bits.

The Zebra repeat is a one off print I created about a year ago and I've been wondering what to do with the fabric for ages. I'd made the screen for a PrintHaus open day and had made a cushion for my friend Neil using a similar effect. It's so simple to do as you just line up the diferent colour inks on either side of the screen and pull them across with the squeegee at the same time. It creates a blend of the shades in the middle. I went for the classic pink and purple and cacked the pillow with a pink polka dot!

I made a space print cushion for our living room when I moved in with the boy and love it so thought I would make some up for others to enjoy too as it always gets compliments ;) It's backed with a cyan blue fabric with black polka dots, I'm loving spots haha! The main print is navy and has a light blue pixilated cloudy pattern underneath. Hmm I did make a couple of musical cushions on the pink polka dot fabric with trumpets and guitars from the last Snapped Up open day but forgot to take pictures! Will have to grab some tomorrow before we open.

Ah I'm glad I did manage to grab a photo of the jean's I revamped with some heart shaped knee patches and also a printed patch to the back pocket. Eep it's cool to say this -they're available in the shop!!

 

Printing Signs and Patches

Today I have spent the whole day at the PrintHaus making fun things for the new shop!

I wanted to print a sign to go on the wall in the shop and I've been wanting to make sew on patches with some fun drawings on for ages; I was fed up with only being able to get band patches!

This is me making my film work ready to go onto my screen. I would normally print my images from the computer onto acetate so I don't have to keep drawing things over again but as the sign is so big I thought it would be easier to scale it up myself.

I can't get enough of purple at the moment so decided to print the text in a lovely rich shade that I mixed up myself. I thought it would compliment the colours of the patterned fabric that I wanted to use. I'm planning on stitching it up and finishing it in the morning so will post more pics when it's finished!

In between all this sign making I also printed a tonne of patches! As I was using waterbased inks I thought I'd take advantage of only being able to do about 4 prints before the ink started drying in the screen and change colours!

So tonight is filled with cutting them all out with the pinkin shears! Oh I lead an exciting life haha!

 

State Funeral Patch

So my boyfriend and my brother play in a band together. They're called State Funeral and have recently recorded their first e.p. - you can listen to a few tracks here. To go along with the record, I was asked to screen print a load of patches - well 500 patches to be precise!

My boyfriend did come and lend a hand, cutting everything out and putting things through the dryer for me. It was one of those days tho to be honest - I ended up making the stencil on the screen up 3 times! So finally got printing hours behind schedule (I always plan how long things are going to take in my head first - I guess its a freelance thing, trying to price up time!) It was a fun day anyway as lots of familiar faces were down the PrintHaus doing various things too.

I ended up having to go over the font with a Posca pen to thicken up the lines a bit; one of the reasons for multiple screen making. Posca pens are really handy for screen printing, they're felt nibbed pens that are filled with acrylic paint which is opaque, you definitely need these for exposing with photo emulsion. The photo below is me washing the screen out after I'd exposed it.

I set up the screen on the printing carousel rather than the fabric length table. I had planned ahead and managed to pick up some really lovely black canvas for cheap from eBay. We cut the fabric up into 35x45cm pieces and printed 12 patches at a time. Seemed to go quite quick once we finally got started!

Although we lost a bit of the finer details, I think they look like decent punk rock patches! All we have left to do now is cut them up individually but I might phone my bro for help with that......