Silkscreen Printing T-Shirts at Home

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Okay, so the way that this particular method works and this method's been around for a little while. It's kinda of popular here in Austin, Texas and you know, I didn't invent it, so, but it's sort of a new method of kind of doing this type of screen printing. The way that this method works is you don't use a photo emulsion, you don't have to expose anything to light, you don't use a transparency, it's really more--kind of like painting in the sense that you have to put the image onto the fabric with your own, you know with your own hands or with a paintbrush. The basic idea is instead of a screen, instead of a big, sort of wooden frame screen, you use embroidery hoops and these are really cheap. You just buy them at a craft or fabric store, so you save money that way. You buy your own fabric and there's all kinds of fabric you can use, also available really cheaply. Instead of using an emulsion, you use a glue, that's a water based glue, but once it's dry, it's totally waterproof and it's no longer water soluble. And you just basically paint that on the fabric where you don't want the ink or the paint to go through and then after that's dry, you stretch it into an embroidery screen. You'll use fabric inks or you know, paper inks whichever one you decide and a squeegee just like you would with regular screen printing. So that's kind of an overview of the process and we're going to go through that step by step."