Screen Printing with our Super star Craft Kit.
Creating your Paper Stencil
Draw or trace your design on to your Stencil Paper, You can get creative and create your own unique design, but bare in mind they have to be ‘stencil style’ designs when you are making a design out of paper. Alternatively you can use the templates provided in the kit, we also have lots of other free designs available to download for free form our website
Cut out your stencil using a craft knife or scissors depending on how detailed your design is, remember to take care during this stage and if you are using this kit with kids make sure you do this stage for them.
Taping your Stencil to your Screen
Place your stencil over your Screen, taping it to the underside of the screen to secure. You can also tape up the areas of the screen around your stencil to stop your ink escaping through onto your garment, this is called blocking out your screen and makes the process a lot less messy.
Then you can flip your screen so the stencil is facing down.
Prepare your garment… we are printing a tote bag.
Next grab the item that you are printing onto, this could be paper, cardboard or fabric as our Waterbased inks will print on to any of these. We have chosen to print this design onto a Canvas Tote bag, we flatten this down, and even iron it to create a smooth print surface, we also ad a piece of scrap paper inside the bag to give it a more rigid surface and prevent ink transferring to the back of the garment.
You can then place your screen, stencil side down on top of your garment, we have place our screen in the centre of our Tote bag but you can experiment with print layouts.
Add ink to the screen.
Place your ink at the top of the screen just above your image, for this print i thought I would use a combination of Baboon Bum Red Waterbased Ink and Sealife Blue Waterbased ink to create a Ombre, blend effect.
Time to print!
Place squeegee onto the ink and pull towards you, and repeat if necessary. Make sure your squeegee is at a 45 degree angle. Anything less and it wont push the ink through correctly.
Lift your screen to reveal your print! We are going to repeat the design all over the frontside of the bag. To do this we use a heat gun/hair drier to touch dry the print , to prevent any ink transfer or smudging your print.
Leave your print to air dry, once dry you can seal with a hot iron or a heat press. if using an iron protect your print with heat resistant paper, make sure your print reaches 160 degrees.
Clean up!
Make sure you wash your screen out once you have finished to prevent ink blocking the screen, we use a kitchen sink to clean ours, simply run water over your screen and scrub both sides of the screen to remove all excess ink. you can use washing up liquid to help it along and for added cleaning power you can use our eco Cleaning solution.
For more information on this kit and all of our other Screen printing kits visit our website.
