screen-printed fabric and ceramics
I love hand-printed fabric and purchase it from various etsy sellers on a regular basis. Current favorites are this and this and this.
Much as I love hand-printed fabric, I have never screen-printed fabric myself. So, even though I knew that Lynn (firbraartysta) made custom screens at a very reasonable price, I didn't immediately have it in mind to order one from her UNTIL I realized that her thermofax screens are flexible and I might be able to wrap them around ceramics and print on ceramics. I hand-painted some mugs last year and loved the process and results. (If you want to see thermofax screens, with an explanation, check out Lynn's shop and YouTube channel.)
Well, I asked Lynn about printing on ceramics at a Modern Quilt Guild meeting and she had never tried it, but because the ceramics paint that I have (Pebeo Porcelaine) is water-based, she thought it might work. She generously offered to send me a screen so that I might experiment. With in a couple of days, I had emailed her this doodle:
Which is based on this 1950s textile:
Except I was trying to have the shapes look less like windows and more like vintage Fisher Price Little People character silhouettes.
When the screen arrived, I tried it out on fabric first, to make sure I understood the technique.
Easy peasy!
I printed up a bunch of blue and yellow for my Grandma's quilt in no time!
If I had planned ahead at all, I could have had a much cleaner repeat, but I wasn't in the mood for fastidiousness, so there are some gappy bits.
Results in using the screen with Pebeo Porcelaine onto ceramics were mixed. I simply could not get a clean print onto my mug:
This is the best I could do. The problem here is NOT the paint or the screen, rather it is the fact that the mug is a very hard surface that curves. Luckily, you can wash the Pebeo Porcelaine off and try again, so I was able to try multiple times to get something I liked. This is the best I could do and getting this involved using a lot of tape to hold the screen in place on the mug, printing a tiny bit, moving the screen and printing another tiny bit. Not a fun process and not really the result I wanted. Oh well.
Using the same paint and screen, I was able to get a clean print onto a 100% flat surface:
So, I guess that if I wanted to print onto FLAT plates I could. It's much more likely that I'll be printing some more fabric however, now that I've begun, I'm hooked!
Much as I love hand-printed fabric, I have never screen-printed fabric myself. So, even though I knew that Lynn (firbraartysta) made custom screens at a very reasonable price, I didn't immediately have it in mind to order one from her UNTIL I realized that her thermofax screens are flexible and I might be able to wrap them around ceramics and print on ceramics. I hand-painted some mugs last year and loved the process and results. (If you want to see thermofax screens, with an explanation, check out Lynn's shop and YouTube channel.)
Well, I asked Lynn about printing on ceramics at a Modern Quilt Guild meeting and she had never tried it, but because the ceramics paint that I have (Pebeo Porcelaine) is water-based, she thought it might work. She generously offered to send me a screen so that I might experiment. With in a couple of days, I had emailed her this doodle:
Which is based on this 1950s textile:
Except I was trying to have the shapes look less like windows and more like vintage Fisher Price Little People character silhouettes.
When the screen arrived, I tried it out on fabric first, to make sure I understood the technique.
Easy peasy!
I printed up a bunch of blue and yellow for my Grandma's quilt in no time!
Results in using the screen with Pebeo Porcelaine onto ceramics were mixed. I simply could not get a clean print onto my mug:
This is the best I could do. The problem here is NOT the paint or the screen, rather it is the fact that the mug is a very hard surface that curves. Luckily, you can wash the Pebeo Porcelaine off and try again, so I was able to try multiple times to get something I liked. This is the best I could do and getting this involved using a lot of tape to hold the screen in place on the mug, printing a tiny bit, moving the screen and printing another tiny bit. Not a fun process and not really the result I wanted. Oh well.
Using the same paint and screen, I was able to get a clean print onto a 100% flat surface:
