With the test print done and a whole long weekend to wait antsily to get back into the studio, I burst in at ten in the morning on Monday and set to work. What I thought might take me two hours actually took close to five or six. When I finally finished my one yard of gray flamingo fabric in the afternoon, I began to truly appreciate the time-consuming process of hand-printing fabric. I suppose I realized this with the drunken circles at midnight, but I must have forgotten along my excited path. Nevertheless, I am still in love with printing. And I am faster.
Mid-afternoon a student from last month came in with three huge stacks of what she had printed in her time at the Fuji Studio. My teacher, Kathy, told me that this student was a speed demon when it came to printing. That she could print an entire huge piece of fabric in two hours. Challenge accepted. This student gave me some pointers for going faster, such as piling my clamps on the corners of my screens instead of actually clamping them down, and pulling the ink across the screen several extra times to extend the pulls between washings. With this and the discovery that clogged spots on screens can quickly be remedied with some concentrated finger scrubbing to avoid the dreaded wash-power rinse-dry cycle, I quickly got to work on the top half of my gray fabric and a new yard of mint.
However, by 7:30, with almost ten hours of printing under my belt, I was exhausted. Sweaty and close to burnt out, I picked up and folded my precious new fabrics, postponing the rest of the mint printing till the next class period, and headed home. More Wednesday!!
Mid-afternoon a student from last month came in with three huge stacks of what she had printed in her time at the Fuji Studio. My teacher, Kathy, told me that this student was a speed demon when it came to printing. That she could print an entire huge piece of fabric in two hours. Challenge accepted. This student gave me some pointers for going faster, such as piling my clamps on the corners of my screens instead of actually clamping them down, and pulling the ink across the screen several extra times to extend the pulls between washings. With this and the discovery that clogged spots on screens can quickly be remedied with some concentrated finger scrubbing to avoid the dreaded wash-power rinse-dry cycle, I quickly got to work on the top half of my gray fabric and a new yard of mint.
However, by 7:30, with almost ten hours of printing under my belt, I was exhausted. Sweaty and close to burnt out, I picked up and folded my precious new fabrics, postponing the rest of the mint printing till the next class period, and headed home. More Wednesday!!