bat wings WIP

I thought I'd open the studio up today... I've been dying to start using my gocco for cloth printing, but with a schedule as tight as I've had lately, the process has been slow. This weekend, I got to start on the work for the first screen.

I decided that in the spirit of the autumn, I thought I'd use the weird-looking bat nuts I brought back from Sichuan in 2002. They look Halloween-y don't they? So, I took some photos, and then edited the best one to use on the silk screen.







Then I just had to print it out and xerox it for burning the screen master.

Today I made the screen and discovered the challenges of printing on cloth! First, the ink is really thick and dries fast, making it difficult to mix. As far as I can tell, the fabric inks only come in black, white, red, yellow, blue, green and brown. When I tried mixing the brown to come up with a more appealing walnut color, I quickly realized that this trial-and error process was going to waste a lot of ink! So I tried printing the brown mix and wasn't happy with the resulting print. So of course, I switched to black!















Now I'm pretty happy with the print. It does take some getting used to, though! Although I didn't want black for this particular graphic, I'm going to stick with it for now. What do you think? Is the image too weird? Cool?



ETA: Although I don't have the towels ready to show, I do have some fabric panels finished and they look AWESOME! I'll be posting them as supplies tonight on Bamboo Village Supply.