Light Drapes

I screen printed some cotton to make drapes for my room. 12 prints per drape, 4 drapes, and a whole lot of work.

THE Dress

As many people know, I enjoy watching Project Runway. I often have fantasies of making outfits in record timing. Of course, this dress took more like a total of four days. Regardless, one of my proudest moments was when I first tried on the finished piece. That is what I feel is the truest type of pride: the type that originates directly from the object itself, not from the comments it receives (even though I did get a lot of complements). In the making of this dress, I used a pattern but had to drastically alter it in order to make it my size. The easiest way to get the print on, I found, was just to print it onto the finished dress. All I had to do was iron it flat and lay my silk screen on top of it.

Don't rake the Tabletop!

 This table was boring. It used to be just plain white, bought as quick party furniture from Ikea. With the use of stencils and some champagne colored metallic paint, I was able to embellish this table and give it personality. I don't quite know why I chose this pattern; I've always just had it in my head. It's not like ginko leaves are particularly important to me. I had to look up "fan shaped leaf" on Google Images in order the get the shape and the name right.

In order to seal the paint, I had to use a finish (non yellowing). This finish came in a spray can so it gave my piece a nice and even coat, that is until the second coat, where it ran out and started to dribble finish in a quite uneven manner. Like in most of my projects, I end up doing something weird to my hands (like dying them pink), this time I accidentally "finished" my hand. It was very shiny for a day or two, until the finish started to act as an adhesive. I know, very important information.

Printing

This was one of my first printing pieces done without a silk screen. I used acrylic to etch into. This is one of my favorite pieces, so therefore it has been framed and placed on one of my walls.

Printing T-shirts

Originally, my income from the craft fair came from selling stuffed animals. Competition in the stuffed animal business was very high, so I needed to find some different craft that would stand out among all the others. I found it strange that no one sold T-shirts, so after getting a silkscreen, I worked on that. In the beginning I used screen filler, but found it messy and time consuming. A better method, for me, was keeping a notebook of stencils and inserting them under my silkscreen. This way I could avoid a bigger clean up.