Craftacular Progress Update #3: Screen printing tote bags!

For my third Craftacular progress update {10 days left!}, I wanted to focus on screen printing my tote bags, which my friend Dave and I did over the weekend.

Didn’t they come out fantastic?! I think so. I have a feeling these babies will go pretty quickly at the Craftacular. If I do have any left over, I will put them up for sale in my Etsy shop. This is kind of a long post {lots of photos!}, so to save some vertical blogroll space, keep reading it after the jump.

So what’s screen printing all about? Well, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you print cool things using a screen. If you’re interested in trying this out yourself, check the end of this post for information on where we bought our supplies. You start out by creating your screen:

Dave painstakingly traced out my intricate logo with a toothpick the night before so that it would dry overnight. The blue stuff is screen drawing fluid, and it dissolves in water. {That step comes a bit later.}

After the screen drawing fluid dries, you paint over it and the entire rest of the screen with screen filler. This stuff ensures that the screen printing ink will not be able to flow through parts of the screen that it shouldn’t.

Once the filler has dried, you spray the hell out of the blue stuff to reveal your screen. I liken it to the Wicked Witch of the West — you attack it with water, and it dissolves:

The filler paint that you painted on top of the drawing fluid will also come off. Make sure you check it very closely for straggler pieces of filler paint and drawing fluid, because it will affect how your final products look. After much careful inspection, the finished Poor & Pretty logo screen looked like this:

After you let this dry, you can start getting down to the nitty-gritty. Grab your ink and a spoon:

You can just barely spot it in this photo, but see how we’ve lain out the tote bag on top of some cardboard, then the screen on top of the tote, and the screen is propped up by something at the far end? That’s actually a roll of painter’s tape. It doesn’t need much lift — just a couple of inches, but make sure you prop up your screen before spooning ink onto it.

While your screen is still propped up on one side, spread the ink carefully, smoothly, and evenly over the screen with a squeegee {that is a fun word to type and say}.

Next, gently remove the roll of tape {or whatever you use to prop up the screen} and let the screen rest on top of the tote bag. Using lots of strength, push the squeegee back over the screen. If you don’t press hard enough, your ink will not seep through the screen {which is what happened when I tried doing it!}, and if you push too hard, I suppose you could break the screen, but that probably won’t happen.

And, voilà! Our first tote bag:

A quick spotlight on the tote bags: I was really happy to find totes that were not only environmentally friendly — they’re made from 80% recycled cotton and 20% recycled soda bottles — they’re also manufactured in the United States by Enviro-Tote, right in New Hampshire! Score!

After you admire your superior crafts{wo}manship, fold the rest of the bag so that the wet ink is on top, not touching any other part of the bag, and you put it into a preheated 350º oven for 3 minutes. Be careful taking it out, it will be toasty! Lay it flat onto a surface to cool down and allow the ink to settle for as long as possible.

Dave suggested I bring along a plain t-shirt so we could screen print my logo onto it for future craft fairs {and also just to have my own Poor & Pretty shirt!}. We used some white ink he had left over from his son’s birthday party:

I am really psyched with how they came out. And, honestly? Screen printing was not as crazy involved as I thought it would be. Sure, it definitely can get way more complex if you are printing with multiple colors or making hundreds of shirts, but just doing a few things with one color, it’s fairly simple. I brought home my screen, so I may break it out for future uses.

Want to do your own screen printing? Sweet! Here’s where Dave and I bought our supplies:

• Bags: Enviro-Tote.
• Drawing fluid and screen filler: I recommend getting the comprehensive screen printing beginner’s kit from Speedball.
• Ink: Blick Water-Base Acrylic Textile Screen Printing Ink in Fluorescent Magenta.
• Screen: Speedball. They also have a great introduction guide to screen printing.
• Squeegee: Find similar ones here.

Please note: neither Dave nor I are professional screen printers. If you’re looking to have some professional work done, try my friend Rachel’s family biz, CT Shirt Man.