Thursday, June 1, 2017

Making a silk screen with vinyl

A shoulder injury has kept me away from the computer for a while but now I hope it is on the mend. Recently I read an article in an old Quilting Arts magazine about making silk screens using fusible vinyl. It looked interesting and I had some iron-on vinyl so I gave it a go. It was so much fun that now I have made many more screens and some of the prints I did were used in the previous post. Here is a video how to I made explaining how I do it. 


The video can also be seen larger on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/6_mKE5VHXdY 
There are more detailed instructions in the video.

Some of the designs I have made and used
 Step 1. Start with some iron-on vinyl or fusible vinyl. I have two brands here in Australia, Legacy and Thermoweb that I bought at Spotlight fabric store. You also need the screen fabric. You can use silk but any sheer polyester will do. You can't use nylon because it will melt when you iron it. The iron needs to be on the polyester setting to make the glue stick properly.

A large pattern screen, about 15 ins square from strips of vinyl
2. Draw your design on the paper side of the fusible. You do not reverse the design. Cut out your design and stick the vinyl to your fabric. I did several different types of designs but my favorites are the geometric patterns because I think I will use them more often.

I did some gold printing over some rough fabric painting.
This is the one that got dropped when the purple was still wet, oops!
 3. When you have the vinyl placed onto the fabric, iron it on. Don't start with your iron too hot or you could melt your vinyl. That is it. Now you are ready to use the silk screen. Sometimes I put duct tape around the edge of the screen to make it easier for me to handle but that is not necessary.


4. I tried a lot of different paints and screen inks. As long as it is thick and smooth anything will work. I even used tube acrylic paint when I printed onto paper and it worked well. An old credit card worked well for spreading the paint.

  Some card designs I printed as shown in the video.

A close up of the image where I used puff paint for the screen printing.

 This is the lily that was printed with So Soft paints by Decoart. You can see all the bubbles have gone when it dried.

 Printed using Lumiere paints. I will add machine stitching to this one and make it into a journal page later in the year.

2 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed doing this Wendy, thanks for posting the video - great way to recap what you taught us.

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