The Owls are Back!

I haven't mentioned screen printing in a while, but I have been working on it...

After one failed attempt after another at burning the large screens myself, Justin suggested burning a smaller size again. I was eager to see a screen turn out again, it had been so long! When that one also turned out terrible, I was guessing the emulsion was to blame. But I'd also had *enough*. (For now, at least)

I started looking into having a local screen printing shop burn the screen for me. This turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had expected. This is not a thing that shops normally do, which I knew. Aparently, even though they are capable, they weren't willing to do it. I did fine one shop, though, that said "yes".

The price quote was low, but they didn't have a scoop coater big enough to put the emulsion on the large screen, so she said to bring it in with the emulsion already applied. Not trusting my emulsion, I bought a new scoop coater to bring with the screen! All of this added at least a month to the wait ~ making all of the phone calls, waiting to have money to buy the coater, waiting for the coater in the mail, and waiting for the screen to be burned. But the wait is over!



Having the shop apply the emulsion and create the trasparency bumped the price waaayyy up, but it was still do-able. And so much nicer than trying to do it myself, and having to keep up with all of those supplies as well.

I tested the screen out this weekend, but my ink supply was a little low. I had to do a lot of touch ups on the prints, and cut off some of the print where the ink did not cover well enough. Unfortunately you have to have a *lot* more ink on the screen than you are going to use, so even a half-full bottle was not enough for something this large. Perhaps I can scrape a little more out of the bottle and try again...



I've also got some larger bottles of ink in red and black on their way to me now, so I hope the future prints will turn out better and I can start cranking these things out again! That giant squeegee is a little unwieldy, but I'll hopefully get used to it. And expect to see more colors and more designs in the future.