My original intention had been to print up enough fabric to make a pillow for Steph (my Princess Doraldina partner-in-crime), sew up a pillow for Christmas, and surprise her. But I couldn’t wait that long to share what I had done with her 1000 Flowers pattern, so I texted her some photos of what I’ve been up to. And with that, we’ve been off on a roll, developing a collection derived from my screenprinting experimentation.

Here are some samples. Some of my printing is a little spotty. I’m quickly learning that the number of passes with the squeegee makes a big difference, which is no surprise. I tried bleaching some color out of the plain blue fabric on the lower right piece, and adding color in to some plain muslin first with an attempt at food coloring dye (with unimpressive results), and then just painting on a thin acrylic wash. (I’m not sure how well any of these pieces would hold up in the laundry.)

Over the course of the week, I also switched from cutting vinyl templates to developing screens with photo emulsion. After only two tries, I managed to find the right recipe of time and exposure to a surprisingly good image, and I made a screen using Princess Doraldina’s Long Distance Lovers pattern.

I figured that I had better try out the repeat on paper before graduating to fabric, which was good, because I had not yet figured out what the top/bottom repeat was yet.

While micky-mousing around trying to work out the repeat, I decided that it was also time to try my first two-color print, and since I didn’t want to waste any fabric yet, I printed it first on a scrap paper print, and then on scrap fabric.

I was surprised and delighted with the results! So the next morning, I patiently worked out and taped off the repeat, and managed to print a couple of half-way decent pieces of fabric. It has all kinds of omissions and registration errors, which is part of its charm.

I would love to cover a couch with this. It’s going to take more than 2 yards for that, though.