Repeat Printing with Thermofax Screens

Hello! I want to invite you over to The Printed Fabric Bee blog for the entire month of October. I am sharing a series of posts on how I repeat print with screen printing, mainly Thermofax screens.

You will learn my process on creating some printed yardage like the piece in the photo above.

Click here to visit The Printed Fabric Bee.

Screen Printed Fabrics Now Available

I'm so happy to share with you that I have gotten my fat quarter bundles listed in my Etsy shop. It feels good to have met that goal. Thanks for looking. Have a great weekend.

Screen Printed Textiles

I have been overwhelmed, frustrated, and thrilled all at the same time recently. It's been crazy busy around here and I feel like I am hitting brick walls when it comes to trying to meet my own personal deadlines. I'm happy to say that those walls are crumbling down and I'm getting closer. Closer to what, you ask?  Getting my hand printed fabrics ready and listed in my Etsy shop. In fact, I'm hoping to get the first bundles listed by this coming Friday?  The key word there is "hoping". 

I am loving learning all about the screen printing process. There are so many steps to try and become skilled at within the process, and some of those steps have been very challenging. Early on when I decided to pursue this idea of creating my own line of printed fabrics, I was planning to use my Thermofax screens exclusively. Well it didn't take me very long to figure out that the scale I really wanted to do things in was not ideal for Thermofax screens. So I proceeded to learn how to print textiles with a typical screen printing process. One where you create your design on the screen with the photo emulsion process. While I have gotten better with the skills and am able to produce some usable homemade screens, I have also purchased some screens from an online source where they will prepare the screens with my image.

The photos in this post show a bit of what I've been doing for the past few weeks. It's been an exciting new journey for me and I can't wait to become even more skilled with the techniques of screen printing. It seems that every day brings new challenges that I need to figure out and hopefully master.

Screen Printing and Dyeing, Oh My!

I've been busy. Very busy. I had planned on having some screen printed fabrics in my Etsy shop by now, but I've had a few hiccups along the way which has caused a slight delay. I'm hoping by the end of March, crossing my fingers.

I did manage to get some hand dyed batiks and other hand dyed fabrics into the shop recently. You can see those here.

I've gotten some fabrics printed, in the two designs above, but not as much as I wanted to get done before I found there were some issues I needed to deal with before moving forward. These two designs are called Rings Around and Dashing.

So I'm wondering, and would love your input, what would you prefer when shopping for my screen printed fabrics....your choice of printed design on your choice of fabric color or do you like to buy fat quarter bundles with mix and match printed designs and fabric colors? Thank you for any and all input!

My Own Fabric Line

For a long while now I've had a dream to see my designs on fabric for quilting/sewing. I recently had an eye opening jolt after seeing a designer from overseas doing something that I can actually do (but never thought of)...and she is very successful at it. That designer is Karen Lewis and she has a wonderful line of screen printed designs that she has created. You can see her site here.

So over the past few weeks I've been researching and planning and executing my plans. I've created several screens using my Thermofax machine and here are my first couple of printing tests. 

These fabrics are hand dyed by me and while I will offer screened designs on hand dyed fabrics, I also plan to use commercial solid fabrics with my designs screened on them as well.

Below is my new set up for screen printing larger fabric pieces. My husband helped me create a padded board and t-square so that I can easily set up for repeat printing. I used it for the first time this morning and am thrilled with how well it worked.

My studio space has become too small for me over the years as I've developed my likes in what I love doing. It gets a bit crowded in the room with this screen printing table set up...so I take it down and set it up when I need it.  Another goal/plan I have is to move part of my sewing space into an unused room in my house (living room). We never ever use that room, so I plan to sell some of my furniture and turn it into my sewing space and then use my current space for my printing/painting work. It's a plan that may take a few months or more to actually execute, but I look forward to it.

I am very excited to start creating more screen printed fabrics and hope to have them available soon in my Etsy shop.

Another fabric item I plan to add to my Etsy shop are my hand dyed batiks. I'm having so much fun playing with this technique. I recently learned how to use batik wax, which is different from soy wax. I much prefer the batik wax as I found the soy wax much too slimy and hard to remove the final traces of it.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope my hand printed/hand batik fabrics are appealing to you.