I recently came back from a week long Melbourne trip. It was filled with so much art and creativeness that I think I might have to share more than one post about my trip.

Today’s post is going to be just about my screen printing workshop with the Harvest girls. One word: INSPIRING….

Or make that three words:

HAPPINESS!!

FUN!!

MAGICAL!!!!

If you are considering a workshop at Harvest Workroom, or have an interest in screen printing, I hope my post will encourage you to take up a class! I chose Design and screen print your own fabric. It’s a two day workshop, run by the lovely Jess Wright.

I should confess that flying to Melbourne to attend a workshop seemed exciting at first but closer to the time of my travels, I started to feel very nervous and was even regretting my enrollment. I had no experience with screen printing so I felt out of my depths. I tried a few things to prepare myself for class:

1. Read up on screen printing, particularly fabric printing (I’d recommend Lena Corwin’s Printing by Hand)

2. Brainstorm pattern ideas and draw daily

3. Practice stencil cutting

Of course you don’t have to do all of this, in fact you might like to turn up and learn as you go! But the preparation gave me a basic understanding of the screen printing process and also encouraged me to play around with patterns.

The first day of the workshop was like a test run. We spent some time stencil cutting our patterns before applying it to our screen and adding fabric ink.

I realised quickly that screen printing requires good discipline and organisation skills because the whole process gets messy quickly: dirty screens, spilled ink, upside down images…and then back to more tedious stencil cutting!

By the end of the class, I was feeling a little frazzled because there was so much information to process and this whole world of screen printing suddenly seemed so overwhelming! I wasn’t sure if others felt the same but Jess was so patient and she told us to go home, have a rest and regroup for tomorrow!

On the second day of the workshop we learned about repeat printing on fabric. Using the swiss repeat technique, I made a confetti stencil pattern and picked colours that reminded me of candy floss and strawberry sorbet.

After my very messy day on day one, day two seemed easier as I became more comfortable in using the squeegee. There is an art to it and over time I even learned to pick up the happy sounds that a good squeegee print makes!

I love my confetti fabric!

Next I worked on my posie pattern. I wanted a two colour screen print so I mixed up some bright orange and ocean blue. As you know I’m very partial to these colours because they are my wedding colours!

Posie printing in action…

The final result!

And with all the excitement and fun going on…before I knew it the day had flown by so quickly!

I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of my workshop. It has certainly inspired me to do more screen printing projects at home. I’m going to shop around for some supplies and experiment with colours and different fabrics. At the mean time, I’m going to see what I can make with my fabric prints from Harvest. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! Tea towels? Pillow cases? Let me know!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 7th, 2013 at 8:38 am and is filed under Art & Design, diy & handmade tutorial, Everyday, Travel stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.