Cleaning a Screen After Silkscreening

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: So I'm going to go wash my screen out now 'cause I've done four prints and I'm going to want to do some more in the future because these came out really good. So I'm going to wash my screen out while the ink is still wet, don't wait to do it because if you do the ink won't come out so I'm going to go run to the garden and get out the garden hose and just wash the heck out of this thing. So when you see me next time, this thing should be clean. All right I've washed out my screen 'cause I want to use it again and I did it with a hose while the ink was still wet because you can't do it afterwards, you can forget about it at that point. But I just--really high pressure just kinda with the hose you know you don't want to blow it out of the embroidery hoops so you know don't do it at the car wash or the power washer or something but still, but I look at it now and it you know, I can examine it and I can look and I see all the holes that should be open all the pores in the fabric that should be open are open. I mean there's water in there but it's not ink and you know and it's okay if there's still some ink here because that really doesn't matter because that's on you know, that's not on the printing surface, I mean it's on the surface but it's not on the image so it's okay if some of that dries there it's not a big deal. This is still a little bit wet and you can take this outside to dry or just hang it up somewhere in the house till its dry and you can use it again. And then just the last for the clean up is you know any ink that hasn't dried--I mean like, for example, on the squeegee here there's some ink on here and there's no need for me to just wipe that off with in the rag and throw it away. So I'm going to kinda--I mean I'm just, I'm going to save my ink, I'm going to be economical and ecological and all that. I'm just going to kinda scrape kind of what I've got off the squeegee as much as I can, put it back on my little kinda tub of ink there. I mean there's always going to be some waste but you know I was able to get good little a third of a teaspoon that way. And then you know I kinda have some over here from when I set it down and you don't have to do this step but you know you'll find that you go through screening ink really fast so it's kinda not a bad idea to reclaim of as much of it as you can. So I'm going to just kinda whack as much of this as I can back into the container I mean it's sort of goopy kinda has a, almost like a consistency like sticky jelly or something. And once I kinda done with that I mean you'll have a little bit of waste on this spoon but you know whatever. Here's my lid, close this tight so that next time you use them they will still have that nice kind of a slimy, gloppy consistency. We're going to kinda close this tight and so my ink is ready for next time, screen's ready for next time and then again I'm gonna--now I'm going to go and just go back outside to the hose I'm going to wash the squeegee off and probably throw that spoon and that paper away and I'll be able to do this again next time. So in the next clip we'll look at the finish products and wrap up."