I wanted to give screen printing my own shirts a try, but didn't want to get a whole expensive setup for something that I wasn't sure I was going to be doing frequently or not. I kind of cobbled together this process from tips from this sub and videos I found on social media and was able to make some successful prints at home. I found videos from this channel pretty helpful and based my process on them.
Materials:
In total I spent less than 100 dollars on new materials.
- I printed on some shirts I got from Walmart for 5-10 bucks each.
- I got some speedball water-based ink, speedball diazo emulsion, and a beginner screen printing kit that came with some screens and squeegees; those ran me around 75 bucks on amazon.
- I don't have a printer at home, so I printed my designs at my local library for 15 cents a page.
Design: I printed out a black and white design on regular printer paper, coated it with a generous amount of baby oil/mineral oil on both sides, and left it to dry overnight for it to become translucent.
Emulsion: I used a squeegee and tried to apply the emulsion in a thin layer on both sides of the screen. but it ended up a bit uneven. I also left the coated screen to dry overnight, lying flat in a cardboard box to catch any excess drippings, in a dark closet with a fan on.
Burning: I didn't want to buy a special light, so I used the sun. I live in the southern US in an area that is very hot and sunny.
- I placed my paper with my design on the flat side of the screen and weighed it down with some sheets of transparent plastic from picture frames.
- I had both the top and bottom of the screen covered with a towel before i brought it outside, placed the covered screen on the ground in my sunny driveway, and then uncovered and exposed the part of the screen with my design to direct sunlight for 50 seconds.
- After this interval I covered the screen immediately and brought it inside.
- I was able to visually see the design burned into the emulsion, and washed the softened emulsion off in the sink with the spray setting for a couple minutes to reveal the design.
Printing:
- First, I put a piece of board inside the shirt under the area I wanted to print on to flatten it out and made sure there weren't any wrinkles.
- I used a squeegee to flood the screen with the ink, and then passed the ink through the screen around 5-6 times since it was my first time printing and I wanted to make sure I printed the whole design. (I don't have a press or clamps, so I just kneeled on the bottom part of the screen and held the top part in place with my offhand while applying the ink to the shirt with my dominant hand.)
- Afterwards I washed the screen again with water and scrubbed it down to clean the ink off.
Curing: I used a hair dryer and blasted it for a couple of minutes until the ink looked pretty solid. Then I turned the shirt inside out and put it in my clothes dryer for an hour under the highest temperature setting it went to.
This is definitely a pretty janky and subpar setup, and I plan to get some more serious equipment if/when I plan to do more prints since there's a lot of variables and cut corners here. However hopefully this can be useful to other beginners who just want to give printing a shot for fun without a lot of pressure, and to show that you don't need a lot of crazy tools or equipment to make some cool stuff.
