Breakdown Screenprinting Course

This weekend I attended a Breakdown Screenprinting course at the MAC, led by Emma Jackson. It was a fabulous weekend. We started by building up print paste and dye on the back (face down when printing) surface of the screen, and then pressing various textured objects into it to make impressions in the paste.









Another way of working was to draw onto the screens with print paste using bottles with thin nozzles, with the drawn lines transferring to the finished prints.



The screens were left to dry overnight, and the next morning we came back to them, and picked out all the embedded objects.







Then the big fun began. We laid the screens down onto the (pre-treated) fabric, applied either clear or coloured print paste, and pushed the squeegee down across the screen. Initially heavy areas of dried pastes were acting as a resist, so applied colours only came through the thinner areas. As the paste got wetter and broke down, more and more transferred onto the fabric, meaning that each screen placement resulted in a different print. While the process was hard to tame, it wasn't entirely unpredictable, and produced beautiful results.






Sadly, someone accidentally picked up two of my three finished pieces of fabric so I can't share them with you at the moment, but the MAC are trying to get them back for me.

From Print To Stitch

I'm now a fully paid up member of Birmingham Embroiderers' Guild, and had a marvellous evening at the members workshop, where we were printing with collograph printing blocks of leaves.

We applied the leaves to stiff board with double sided tape, and then inked them with rollers, applying the print firstly to paper:



My paper print was a bit light, so I inked it a bit more, then printed onto a batik fabric:





If anything, this was probably a bit dark - I think I pressed a bit hard with the brayer.

Here is the collograph print block, apparently they keep rather well & can be reused:



I'm certainly going to experiment more with this technique. It was an easy way to get some lovely prints. For now, I'm going to stitch into my print, to add definition and texture.

If you like the look of the Guild, then pop along to their blog (which I also run!) to find out more about how to join.