2014

lino prints and stencil prints

In the last 2 weeks, in the fabric printing community class I teach, the students have been making lino prints...

and stencil prints...

festival t-shirt printing workshop

Three weeks ago I taught a t-shirt printing workshop for children at the Blythe Hill Fields festival in South East London.

It was a good day.  I was in a crafts tent in the middle of the fields, with a great view down to Canary Wharf:

I started off using my embroidery hoop screens plus stencils - some made by me, and some from "Stencil 101" by Ed Roth and a Dover book of dinosaur stencils.

The children could choose a stencil, a selection of which I had taped to the back of the tent, and a colour of fabric paint, and they put a piece of newspaper inside a t-shirt and placed their stencil on the t-shirt where they wanted to print it. Then they used a plastic card to spread fabric paint over the embroidery hoop screen with the stencil underneath, and lifted up the hoop and stencil to reveal the print. Some children wanted to add hand-painted effects with a brush as well, which added a nice individual creative if messy element to the t-shirts.

Then, when it got busier, which it did particularly when it started to rain and everyone came into the various tents in the festival to shelter, I didn't have time to wash up the hoop screens and just gave out the stencils with brushes and fabric paint.

The children who participated made some great t-shirts and it was a fun day.

handmade screenprinting workshop

Last month I taught a workshop on handmade screenprinting in Peebles, near Edinburgh.

Firstly the workshop participants cut out paper stencils based on previous sketches they had made and printed these onto fabric, using screen mesh stretched in an embroidery hoop as a screen and printing with fabric paint:

Then participants prepared second screens using drawing fluid and screen filler stencils, and printed these as a second layer on their textile prints:

Some more prints:

...and more:

...and a selection of the final prints laid out on a table:

The aim was for participants to try out handmade screenprinting, and to make the base for a textile artwork that could be added to with embroidery or worked on further if the artist wishes.

The workshop participants came mostly from the Peebles Creative Space art group which meets regularly with their teacher, artist Claire Blyth.  They all worked hard throughout the workshop and I think they made a variety of beautiful and original textile prints.

potato prints!

Here are some colourful potato prints on cotton fabric, made by students on a fabric printing course I started teaching last week:

screenprinting using embroidery hoops as screens

Recently I taught a class on handmade printmaking for the Community Learning department at Morley College.  These are some photos of learners making hand-drawn screens, stretched on embroidery hoops, and then screenprinting them onto cushion covers...

Painting over the traced images using screen drawing fluid.  Screen mesh has been stretched in the embroidery hoops.

The "screens" coated with screen filler on top of the dried drawing fluid.  After the screen filler is dry, then drawing fluid can be washed out under a tap, to create a stencil for printing.

Printing the designs onto cushion covers, using textile inks and a small card like an old library card as a squeegee.

Cat stencil design in orange.

Floral design in blue.

Fish and flowers design in brown.

The learners did the printmaking very successfully, and made great printed cushion covers.