Monday fun day.

Monday fun day.


As it’s Monday, the task for today was heading into the dye room again, testing out new techniques and expanding on the ones from last week. Monday mornings are always the hardest, but today I felt motivated and alive and wanted to crack on. Last week I mainly focused on screen printing with puff binder, but this week I wanted to combine this with matte (normal) screen print to see what effects I could create. And these are the results from that experiment.


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 My next technique was painting onto blank screens using procion powder dyes mixed with two different substances, and then screen printing this onto fabric with a substance called manutex (this sets the dye into the fabric). You can have all the fun in the world with this technique as you can literally paint anything onto the screen that you want, and using any colours. The only down fall to this technique is it’s very time consuming, as it takes time to mix everything together, then paint your design on, wait for it to dry, then screen print it on fabric, then wait for that to dry and then finally steam and wash the fabric.

Here are a few images of the process and my final outcomes. Unfortunately it’s quick tricky taking photos of the whole process, so I just managed to get some of the painting onto screen part.

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From these samples my next step is to work into them, stitching and manipulating them in different ways. Hopefully after our sketchbook feedback tomorrow, I will have a set idea as to how I want to add to them.

Who said Monday’s are boring?!


Time to get messy!

Time to get messy!


The print and dye room is the place to be for this unit. You can have all the fun all want and do anything you want! If you go in there with a creative mind, fabulous things will come out of there. And today was the day in which it was my time to do so.

At this moment in time my mind is all over the place, and I’m not entirely sure on what I want to achieve, so I thought heading up there would be the best option to see if it would get my creative mind flowing. Luckily the technician up there is awesome! She has a book full of all different kinds of techniques and samples for all of them! What more could you want?!…

After flicking through various samples I began trialing some, puff binder to start with. Puff binder interacts with heat, causing it to bubble, almost a bit like popcorn when heat is applied to it. A texture I think kids would love! My first samples were just on paper, to see the effect it would give and to use in my sketchbook. Here are a few images of this effect.

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After trialing the puff binder on paper I went onto using bubble wrap as a base, to see what effect it would give (hopefully not the burnt effect). I actually ended up with some really cool textures, the puff bubbling up on top of bubbles in the wrap already creating the 3-dimensional effect even further.

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 My next step was screen printing. Something I’ve always been a bit terrified off, not entirely sure why, but, today was the day to conquer these fears. After using the puff binder and really loving the effect I thought I’d try using it within a print. Luckily the technician had already got some screens with simple prints on to use, just as a starter. If I go along with these ideas for my final garments and samples I will create my own print styled to my concept and research.

The next few images are a step by step of doing screen printing process:

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After this session today I got some really interesting samples (in which I will show you on here tomorrow, as they’re currently drying in the dye room) and more motivation! Always a successful day when that is achieved!

Onwards and upwards!