Screen Printing onto a Jumper

Skill

Learning how to screen print my illustrations onto clothing.

Approach to Learning

As screen printing onto clothes is not very different from printing onto pillowcases/ strip of cotton I just thought I would experiment and learn from watching others.

Key Tips from the Learning Process

(also see Screen Printing onto Pillowcases)

1. I had to print over the jumper's seams on the shoulders and along the bottom. This meant that there was a clog up of paint after printing and sometimes it would miss a bit off. Gareth, who works in screen printing, suggested that I had paper towel ready to blot the excess and I could hand paint the missing bits.
2. The jumpers were quite thick so they took a long time to dry. After waiting a long timeI found out from Gareth, on my course, that there were fans available to speed up the process.
3. One of the fashion students told me that once the print was dry, if I ironed the jumper it would last longer when I wash it.

My screen with the weights on two corners making it stable preventing it from moving when I print.

Learning from my mistake with the pillowcases, I had a test run on an old t-shirt. The picture on the right shows the problem I had with seams.

Overall...

Seeing my illustration blown-up and printed on a jumper has made me feel more confident about my work. While screen- printing is messy and it can go wrong really easily, it has taught me to be less precious about my work, made me experiment more.