After doing so much digital textile design for Princess Doraldina over the past couple of years, I was craving working directly with fabric again, so I set myself up to do a little screen-printing, and have been experimenting with various techniques on recycled fabric that I picked up at Scrap SF.

Working with my pal Stephanie Mesner’s One Thousand Flowers pattern that I helped her develop last summer for Arteriors, I cut a vinyl stencil and applied that to my screen. The pattern has a lot of intricate details which were not conducive to being cut from vinyl at this small scale, so I drew in some of the missing details using Elmer’s washable glue, which worked pretty well as a temporary screen filler, though it doesn’t survive a screen washing. (If you are going to use it for this purpose, you have to reapply it before each printing, which can get a little tedious.)

Using masking tape and a sharpie, I managed to pull off registration for 6 pattern repeats. These are definitely very far from perfect, but the pattern is pretty forgiving. I didn’t even wait for the ink to dry between the repeats, I just blopped the screen in and printed the middle sections. It did take me 3 tries to come up with 2 decent pieces of fabric that I can make pillows out of, but for improvisational fabric printing, I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

For this sample, I initially placed a piece of vinyl directly on the fabric and hand-cut a quick harlequin pattern, then sprayed it with some Clorox foaming cleaner, and let it dry in the sun. It didn’t look like it had had much effect, but after I printed the white, ironed and then washed it, it came out like this.

The areas of the fabric that had been exposed to bleach actually held the ink better, and it washed out a bit in the unexposed areas, which I think creates a great effect. (Or it maybe vice versa. I have to do it again to determine which was which.) I love the distressed effect.

This sample is cotton. The samples above and below are some kind of synthetic blend, which bleach does not effect.

On this sample, I was trying to achieve a more opaque print, so I mixed wallpaper paste with my white ink, which created an almost Damask effect.