So I tried my hand with a new hobby this past week. It took me roughly ten hours to do this, but here we go!



My intention is to do more, hopefully eventually multi-color, but it's a pretty good learning curve, trying to figure out everything, do it properly, all from the back room in my house.

I hope to do some shirts for the various web sites I run, we'll see how that goes though!

 

Looks cool.

 

Very nice!!

 

What method did you use to screen print the shirts?
It looks great

 

photo emulsion (sp?)
It took me three times to properly burn in the screen, as the bulb I got was too close/hot for what I was doing the first two times. Worked great once I figured that out and moved it up to about 2ft from the screen.

 

I'll have to do a search on that one, do you reccomend any web site to learn how? And what equipment did you have to purchase?

Also are you going to start selling these?

 

Here are two websites I used for instructions.

http://www.silkscreenbiz.com/learning/burning.htm
http://www.reuels.com/reuels/page512.html

The second one really has a lot of detail on the process, I was doing textile printing with the photo emulsion to prepare the screen. Basically that involves putting a light sensative substance on the screen, front/back. Let it dry. Then take your design and place it on the screen, use a 250W photo bulb (I got a bulb and light from walmart for <$10. I photoshopped an actual photo and printed it out on white paper, took it to Kinkos and used their copy machine to put it on the transparency paper I had. My printer didn't like printing the transparency, but Kinkos copy machine did it in 2 seconds.

You burn that image into the screen, basically burning all around it, so the light doesn't burn in your image, then you wash away the emulsion that wasn't exposed to the light. That takes probably 10 minutes just to get it to wash away.

It's not a quick process, if done properly I figure it'll take me roughly 3 hours just to get the first shirt done with a design, after that though reproducing a shirt on a screen I have completed would take maybe 5-10 minutes each, then drying time.

I will most likely create some shirts to sell for my websites, not sure about this one yet.

 

Supplies initially ran me about around $80.

 

Thanks for all the info, I may have to give this a try, it looks fun, let me know how it goes with multiple colors