An assignment in positive/negative space left me with several designs which looked like coasters. I decided I should make coasters for Christmas presents, and the best way I could think to transfer the design was silk screen. This was a learning experience.
My first challenge was finding a clamp on shop lamp with a high enough rating to take a 150 watt bulb. Then I had to order the correct bulb in order to follow my exposure instructions.
Next I questioned the exposure time in the Speedball instructions. 15 inches high for only 7 minutes if I have a shop reflector, but 12 inches high for 45 minutes if I use a pie pan reflector. A service rep at Speedball said that shop reflectors can vary greatly, and I should do a test before I do my expose my final screen. This website gave helpful instructions for testing exposure times. Rather than going out to photocopy onto a transparency, I used an old transparency with a small amount of typing on it, and painted numbers with acrylic paint. To make sure my paper for covering up numbers every five minutes was opaque enough, I glued aluminum foil to the back of some scratch paper. I ended up with 15 inches high for 85 minutes, and have decided the 7 minutes in the instructions has to be a typo.
After exposing it, the places where the emulsion was thicker didn’t want to rinse out, so my prints ended up somewhat spotty. I also learned that the glass holding down the transparency should cover the whole design. I thought the being a quarter inch short on the sides wouldn’t matter, but it left a line where the edge of the glass was. The courser light fabric in this photo is my drapes, and not part of the screen.
Making the prints was a simple process in comparison to developing the screen, and went rather quickly. I made some coasters for Christmas presents out of some, and have given them out without photos. I am making a couple of more sets and will show them in another post.
