Glue for Silkscreening T-Shirts

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: Now, with the fabric and the hoops, we could--I guess if we wanted to, if we have the right kind of fabric, we could do a traditional screen print set up in the sense that you know, I could go ahead and stretch my fabric across my hoop and get that set up. And I could coat this, you know get it really nice and tight, I'm not going to do it right now but then I, you know, theoretically I could coat it with the photo emulsion I told you about it in an earlier clip. Let that cure, put an image on the transparency, expose it, wash it out and that's kind of how standard screen printing's done. In this method, instead of using a photo emulsion which is again expensive, time consuming, messy, etcetera, etcetera, we use a glue that is water based so you can put it on easily with a paint brush, but once it dries it is permanent, right? It kinda becomes a plastic and there are different kinds of glue like this. One that is used a lot for people who do this DIY silk screening is called Mod Podge and I think there's a couple of different kinds, but it's pretty cheap. I mean this was $5 for this, you know, jar which is definitely cheaper than the photo emulsion would have been and here's a smaller jar--it comes in different sizes. So again, but the important thing is, is that it's a glue that is water based, but once it's dry, it's not water soluble. That is to say, once it's dry, it's there. You know, you can't clean it up again. And so Mod Podge is a good glue to use for that and so remember what we're going to do is once we have our image kind of traced onto our fabric, we're going to put the Mod Podge or whatever glue you have onto the areas of the image where you don't want the ink to go through and then everything else is going to have these wide open pores, that the ink does get forced through and then your image will get transferred to your fabric or your paper."