Screenprinting at Home!

Check out this baby:







This is something I've been wanting to put together for quite literally FOREVER and today all my screenprinty wishes came true.

I says to Boyf back in the summer: "How easy would it be to put together a home screenprinting table using a board and some kind of hinge-and-clamp arrangement?" Says Boyf: "Pretty easy, if you have the right parts." "Get to it, then", says I. Boyf goes away with set square and steel rule and Google and draws up lavish plans. Said lavish plans then sit on my "To Do" pile for over six months until I come back from the printroom this week with the news that the place is definitely closing for TWO WHOLE MONTHS for a refit and jig-about. So, off we go to get "the right parts".

And here they are: The base board is a glossy cupboard door which was on sale at B&Q. Underneath there are four little rubber door stoppers for feet, and the awesomely perfect clamps are made by Speedball and are here on Lawrences' website, which is where I got them. Screw on feet, screw on hinges et voila: a portable screenprinting bed. The screen frame will have little rubber feet, too (4mm thick or thereabouts), to level it off and give it a bit of "snap". (Technical term meaning a bit of a gap between the mesh of the screen and your paper.) The screen itself is from a System 3 screenprinting kit which I got for Xmas, like, three or four years ago, and haven't actually used yet. It's still in the plastic bag. A-hem. (I'm also pretty sure it was nowhere near as expensive as it is now. I think it was only 30 quid at the time.)

So special thanks need to go to Boyfriend for putting all together for me, in that uber-meticulous way boys do, with precise measurements and pilot holes and everything. I would've just put it roughly in middle, judged it all by eye and marked the holes. Apparently, that's not the proper way to go about it.

I'm going to use my lovely new set-up to print up my work for the Open House at Jubilee in May. Just got to actually put the idea down on paper....it looks great in my head!

In other printing news, after six long and backbreaking hours in the printroom on Wednesday, I came away with 30 new Wolf prints, 25ish of which I think are good enough to sell. I'm aiming to put them up in my various shops in the next couple of days and will flag it up here when I'm sorted.

(Also, I've had a faff with the settings of the blog, resulting in each column being a bit wider so I can stick in my 500px wide photos without having to resize them. I hope it still all fits on your various monitors OK.)