My friend Amy and her family are going to Europe in a couple weeks. She’s a very crafty lady and came up with the brilliant idea to create tour shirts for her group.
I volunteered to help her with the YuDu, and our friend Erin came to help. Good thing too as we ended up doing 14 shirts – front and back. This turned out to be a great social activity ! (and yes - that's my craft room in the photo)
Amy drew the ship design. We had some troubles with it as the lines were just a bit too fine. My first exposure of the emulsion didn’t work out – the lines were so thin that it just wouldn’t wash out. So I copied the design on my all-purpose printer, and selected “darker”, then tried the emulsion again. This time most of the image did wash out of the emulsion, but the lines were still so fine that the paint was drying very quickly in the screen. With doing so many shirts, that became a problem. But we coped ok and just rinsed the screen after every few pulls.
This was the back of the shirt with the ship on front - Isn't this a great idea !?!?
Remember you can click on the picture to see bigger.
This was my first experience in creating multiple items with the YuDu. A few things I learned that really matter in creating multiples that you don’t really have to think about on doing a single item –
- Be aware of how much your screen may be drying between pulls. We were seeing less detail after 2 or 3 pulls because the fine lines in the design were drying quickly.
- Because it takes time to pull one shirt off and put another on – be aware of the position of any air conditioning vents or fans blowing. My machine ended up being right in the path of the air conditioning flow – which caused the paint in the screen to dry faster. I turned the A/C off only to realize that my fan was doing the same thing.
Because we were rinsing the screen after every 2 or 3 pulls – we were losing time waiting for the screen to dry after each rinse. I found that setting the screen in front of a fan works wonders! It dries much faster than in the drying rack. Be careful not to do this to dry your emulsion before you have exposed it. Remember to keep that in very low light until your image is burned in it.
- We found that the paint we were reclaiming was lumpy – so we just added a tiny bit of water to the bottle after reclaiming and shook to mix it. Worked great, thinned the paint out nicely.
This is another shirt Amy made for her family --
The ink is the Gunmetal Bronze color and it's really georgous. It is a black but has lots of sparkle to it. Looked really georgous on some hot pink shirts she did but it didn't photograph well. Love this color paint !!
Then Amy screen printed onto some luggage tags, and onto some document wallets. These were leather, and this was perfect to screen print on. The ink went on beautifully.
I think her family will be a hit in Europe - don't you ?
Makes me want to take a trip so I can customize some things for it !
