Screen Printing and the Breeding of Future Fandoms

Hiya!

We’ve been honing our screen printing technique these past few weeks, so I thought I’d show you all some of our newest creations.

Here are some onesies I bought at Old Navy and printed up for Krystopf and Atlas’s baby boy who is due in October.

Krystopf really liked my giant squid so I figured I could make him and his future son matchy-matchy shirts.  And babies are grabby.  Squids are grabby.  Same difference.

And babies bite and have short useless arms.  And Tyrannosauruses bite and have short useless arms.  They’re pretty much the same thing, right?  RIGHT?

And we’ve recently found out that Rusty and his girlfriend are expecting in the new year so I figured I’d get ahead of the game and rustled up these two.  Rusty (like most people I know) is a huge fan of the ill-fated Joss Whedon show Firefly, so I figured any kid of his would end up being a fan, too.

I think both of these quotations are super appropriate for babies.  This one is inspirational (in a way): “I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.”  We don’t want to talk about what happens after Wash said that.  We’re just not gonna talk about it.

But don’t you love how I got the name printed on the pocket like a wee badge!  SO CUTE!  I had to do that separately and so it was like the world’s smallest screen print!  Actually, the MAL (for Malcolm Reynolds) on the one below was even shorter so TECHNICALLY …

And everyone knows that most kids are secretly saying, “I aim to misbehave.”  I was trying for a rich brown here (because that’s kind of the colour of Firefly) but it sank in a bit too much to the fabric here and didn’t show as much as I wanted.  But that’s okay.  It means I can keep on making more until I get it right!

Oh and here is one that the Pie made.  This was our first double-colour overlay, and it didn’t come out as clear as we’d wanted because our screen was getting old and was a bit on the loose side.  But it was a good first attempt.  And it is a spoof on Capcom, but I don’t really understand the reference.  You’d have to ask the Pie.  He seems to think it’s really funny.

The T-Shirt Ring

This is a cute little last-minute stocking stuffer idea from Homemade Ginger.  You can do it with either hot glue or a needle and thread, and make all sorts of nifty floral accents.

What you need is an old cotton t-shirt, or any other jersey material.  The Pie wore this shirt for Hallowe’en.  He dressed as Peter Parker, the alter ego for his hero Spider-Man, so he just needed to paint the collar of a red shirt to look like he was hiding a Spider-Man costume under his street clothes.  So while he painted the top, I’m just going to use the bottom.

You’re going to cut the hem off the bottom, and cut several circles out of the main fabric.  You’ll also need a circle of felt, about the same size as your circles.  If you’re making a ring you’ll want the circle to be relatively small, whereas if you were making a brooch then the circle will be a bit bigger.

Take a pencil or toothpick or the end of a paintbrush and jab it into the centre of one of your fabric circles.  Scrunch it up around the paintbrush or whatever.  Put a dab of hot glue on the tip of that.

Stick the circle onto the circle of felt.

Repeat, sticking the circles close together, until you’ve filled up the felt.

Trim the result with scissors for tidiness.

To make a bracelet, measure your finger with the t-shirt hem and cut off an appropriately long piece, with a bit of overlap.

Glue the overlap down, then attach it, with the seam side hidden, to the felt.

For a ring, simply make the hem loop a little smaller.

For a brooch, and if you don’t have any of those handy jewelry backing pieces around, take a safety pin, cut two slits in another circle of felt, and slide it through so the working pieces are exposed.

Glue that to the other piece of felt.

That’s it.  Easy and fun.