Printing times...

I haven't been able to post in a while as things have been a little kerayzee in the studio. It's been printing crazy to be exact!! Earlier this year I was asked to make a limited edition t-shirt for music makers Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip, (I'm afraid I can't remember whether I remembered to post about it on here) which seemed to go down really well on their tour and a couple of weeks ago they asked me to design another one based on their track "A letter from God to Man" (Which you can hear somewhere on HERE!). So I did, and that is where I have been, designing and printing 300 tees for their mini tour!!

While I was working I took some images of my hand printing process. I don't have any fancy rigs (except for my heat setter which makes the prints washable...it is a godsend!), just my hands and arms and and some squeegees and lots of space! For these tees I printed 2 different 3 colour colourways for guys and girls and they came out really well, with white and a colour and then a dash of bright bright fluorescent too! So here are some of the pictures...

First of all the screens have to be prepared with the light sensitive emulsion and then my drawings are reproduced as a negative which blocks UV light and makes the screen...
Then the tees arrived and stacked up into an enormous 300 tee stack! The little pic next to it has my test print tee...I always do a test print to make sure that the screen is printing well and the colours are good...
Then comes the actual printing! These images show 3 of the colours going down on different coloured t-shirts...Click the pic to see them bigger if you like. It is quite a long process as with hand printing process and the inks I use, the tees have to be hung to dry between each colour before the next goes on...The studio was swathed in cotton!
Then it was time for a carrot cake break...Mark's lovely mum sent this over to help fuel my printing endeavours. She makes excellent carrot cake indeed.
Then once all of the t-shirts are printed with their colours the heat setting and packaging begins...I didn't take a picture of the heat setting but below is the packaging...rollin' rollin' rollin'! And finally after all of that and lots of counting and re-counting (thanks Mum! She came over to the studio to help me with the counting and adding...) they were finally packaged and ready for the courier to come and take them away to the first stop of the Dan Le Sac Vs scroobius Pip mini tour!! Phew!So that is what I was up to last week. I haven't managed to get images of the finished product yet but will post some on here as soon as I have them...

Toot toot for now!