yudu, do you?

dear screen printing,

i'm having second thoughts about our relationship. you are turning out to be a bit of an elusive, fickle, bossy know-it-all and i don't know if i can handle the shenanigans you're putting me through.

(i find it very cathartic to write acrimonious letters to inanimate concepts, don't you?)

i received the awesome gift of a yudu screen printing machine last christmas (think 14 months ago) and, with the best of intentions, it's been sitting behind a chair. until last week, that is.

i've been daydreaming a design to screen print for months and i finally sat down and designed it in illustrator, laboriously picked out a font (who am i kidding? that's my favorite bit), printed out a transparency for burning my image, and hit a brick wall with the capillary emulsion film included in the yudu kit. capillary emulsion film does not rock my world. 

i hit up an art supply store and gave diazo photo emulsion a whirl. success! a burned image! now to print something. i inked up the screen, gave the squeegee a pull and... eight prints later, i had one that wasn't a complete mess. i found that the yudu inks bled quite badly and the plastic squeegee wasn't worth a tinker's darn.

i made my way back to the art supply store after work tonight and picked up a reliable squeegee and speedball block printing inks in metallic tones (i was looking for screen printing inks, but they only had them for fabric printing, so i took a chance on the block print ink). this time, i had more reliable results, but most had spotty bits where the ink wasn't even. i'm guessing this is from the thickness of the ink, as it was a bit more difficult to pull an even coat.

so, numbering over twenty, lounging about my apartment in various states of completeness, i have my interpretation of a sufjan stevens lyric: and when you crochet i feel mesmerized and proud. this line is just magical to me, as is the whole song, really.

i vectorized a line drawing of a crochet doily to make it have the appearance of a japanese paper cut and chose a slightly neurotic and messy handwriting font to make it more human. i had hopes of selling these prints - i think they would be awesome displayed on vintage hangers and they are cut to fit perfectly into an ikea ribba frame.

this is not me giving up. i have 5 more tubes of ink and a pad of watercolor paper to go before that happens.