A Little Late Night Screenprinting

Here is a preview of the little sea shell cards I have just screen printed.  More photos to come when my SLR is back from the shop. 

Winter Flowers and Owl Matryoshkas

In the last three years, I have been making greeting cards by hand. I had a great time learning how to make linocut prints and trying out screen printing. Yet the experience shows that the precious month between Thanksgiving and Christmas might not be the right time to try out any new techniques. Combining the usual holiday time crunch with my hopeless tendency to procrastinate results in lots of stress and less then perfect product.

This year I chose to curb my urge to do some screen printing. Instead I am digitizing my designs and printing them out on my inkjet. Delegating to the printer gave me a bit more time to bring my designs to completion sooner.  The current themes seem to include owls in the shape of matryoshkas (those nested Russian dolls), largely inspired by burrowing owls, and patterns--both are now available in my Etsy shop.  The plan is to work on nested owls next.

Reeds in the Back Bay Fens

The Back Bay Fens is a beautiful park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead to be part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system. Olmstead turned saltwater marshes and swamp into a beautiful green park that surrounds meandering Muddy River.

In many areas of the park, the river banks are overgrown with reeds. While plans exist to remove these non-native, invasive phragmites next year, today they are still swinging high in the wind, providing refuge for a variety of birds, animals, and occasionally homeless people.

Green in spring and golden in the fall, they whisper gently in the wind and always shine brightly against the sky. I realize that they need to be removed, but still I find them majestic.

A few greeting cards with my attempts to capture the beauty of these tall grasses are now available in my Etsy store.

Fields

Every winter my husband and I visit Walla Walla--a small town in Eastern Washington, known for its sweet onions and more recently for its wineries. The town is surrounded by fields, everywhere as far as the eye can see. Mostly wheat fields.

Nick and I love to drive out into the fields. We get out of the car at the top of a hill, look around, breath in the icy fresh air. It is a bit idylic really.

I love the multitude of lines that transform the baren farm fields into patterns. I finally tried to capture those patterns. First my fields were snowy.

Then I went back to Walla Walla in July, and the fields were green with ripening wheat. Now my fields are green too.

The Towels Project

Silk screen printing cards was so entertaining that I decided to try silk screen printing towels. The idea was that printed flour sack towers might make good holiday gifts for the family. Printing trees on the towels went smoothly. I started with printing the design just twice, but quickly switched to printing it three times on each towel.

Printing the mushrooms turned out to be not so easy. I originally planned to print the entire trio of mushrooms on each towel, and spent a long time simplifying the design and carefully cutting out a stencil. But the stencil turned out to be a bit too big for my screen (I know, I am just brilliant), and it started falling apart right during the first test print.

At this point I almost gave up, but then decided to block off the two most problematic mushrooms, and continue with one promising one. In the end, I think the tree towels look better than the mushroom ones, but hey, I think mushrooms are a very appropriate print for a kitchen towel.

Frogs

While on vacation I spent a few hours sewing frogs. The Purl Bee pattern and instructions were very easy to follow. I embroidered the eyes instead of using beads, to prevent any babies swallowing any beads. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of filling the frogs with rice which rendered them unwashable. Not very smart on my part.

Hopefully, I can find a more versatile next time I make baby toys. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Trees

I decided to explore silk screen printing. As a first attempt, I cut out a little tree design from regular paper, and taped the paper to the screen. Then I screen printed a few greeting cards.


Lessons learned:

• Regular printer paper is too thin--the paint started seeping through it very quickly. Next time I will use freezer paper instead.
• I really should have fixed the placement of the screen on the card (just a few pencil marks would have been enough) before I started printing. Centering the screen on paper was very difficult.