But rather, your dad’s! Allow me to explain. This year, for father’s day, we made silkscreened t-shirts for the resident dad using a process that is significantly different from any silkscreening I have ever done. I remember cutting out stencils and such, but this time, my sister introduced me to the mysteries of using a photosensitive emulsion.
I started by getting my five year old to draw a picture of our family. For the other design, I painted my kids’ soles with non toxic watercolour paint and made footprints on paper.
We then photocopied the images onto a transparency using an inkjet printer. Some lines didn’t come through as boldly as we wanted them to, so we touched them up with a sharpie.
When the images looked good to all involved, we laid them on a prepared silk screen saturated with the emulsion and exposed it to the light. The instructions called for a 500 W bulb and exposing for 6 minutes, but we only had a 20 W bulb (go efficient bulbs!), so we left it for a couple of hours to be safe. Once it was exposed, we rinsed it under cold water, which revealed the designs.
To get more out of our materials, we actually put the two different designs on the same screen and just taped over them (alternately) with packing tape when it came time to actually print the shirts.
There were some goofs on the screen, mostly because of the edges of the glass that we laid on top of the prints to keep them from moving during the exposure process. We fixed these by painting the spots with clear nail polish.
When the time came to print, we got our MEC organic cotton t-shirts (which we pre-washed so the shrinkage wouldn’t ruin our designs) and some water based screen paint and a squeegee. We put some poster board in the shirt to stop the ink from bleeding through to the other side of the t-shirt, and used our screen to print the shirt. There are already a million tutorials out there on how to actually do this, but I thought that I would post what we did because even very small kids can participate in this and produce a much more complex design than they would be able to do with a traditional stencil cutting process, and it was all really easy to do at home.
Oce the paint was dry, we ironed the shirts inside out to set the ink (again with a blocker between layers of shirt (this time we used parchment paper) and here are the finished shirts!
