Printing away

I'm not one of those deal addicts. But when I saw on Facebook that there was a special deal going on a beginners workshop of screen printing, I had to explore it. And bought it.
The trouble with these deals are that you then have to use your voucher, and the weeks go past, busy as busy can be, and the end of the validity is nigh. Not one to waste a voucher, I made the time, even though I couldn't really afford to, so I was not in the best of places to start the workshop.

It may come as a surprise but I didn't actually know what screen printing was, or what you could create with it. Not that it's anything complicated, but if I were to do it again, I'd bring lots of boring t-shirts or other fabric to embellish. As it was, I had to use the thin cotton and one plain tote bag that was provided, while others printed really cool t-shirts for themselves and their families.

The venue was the Bespoke Atelier at the Glue Factory, which was actually a glue factory originally. It's one of those massive factory buildings, or rather, the rooms are massive, the building itself isn't particularly big. The venue is managed by 7 artists of different fields and through their work, this old building is being maintained and worked on bit by bit. It's still freezing cold in it and I can't see how anyone can survive a day in the winter in there, but apparently people don't get frostbites.

The process of screen printing was much easier than I expected, literally it's about cutting out a design which serves as a template or stencil, and then it's fabric, stencil, screen (which is effectively a mesh), colour and a squeegee transfers the colour through the mesh and stencil onto the fabric. It's all quite easy and the results were fab. I was pretty pleased with my own creations (considering that I'm not great at drawing and I had to draw the stencils freehand and then cut them out with a carpet knife freehand too), but when I saw what some of my art school graduate neighbours had come up with, I was green with envy extremely impressed.

My plan is to stick my creations to simple wooden frames and make them into canvas to use them to decorate the yet empty wall of the girls' bedroom. I'm very tempted to get a small screen printing kit to decorate t-shirts and the like but considering that I already have arts and crafts supplies for a) knitting b) cardmaking c) felting d) sewing and e) crochet and pretty little time to do any of them, or in fact not enough space to store all of the stuff, I may file this for now.