Southern Arts and Crafts: The Screen Print

So you wanna make your own screen print? I know a few years ago I wanted to make my own shirt company and I looked at screen printing machines on ebay for thousands of dollars. Oh how silly I was. Well, with a few steps you can make your own sketchy screen print. The only thing I bought was the paint and it was under $3. Most other materials can be found around your house or granny's house. This screen print isn't perfect, there are other and better ways to do this, but this is pretty much the cheapest way.

Materials:

Embroidery Hoop - one big enough to fit around your image and still have a bit of excess space
Panty Hose - for the screen, ask your mom for an old pair
Pen
An Image - print one out from the computer or something like that
Elmer's Glue
Acrylic Paint
A paint brush or some other object to spread paint... I used a small rectangle of cardboard.
Wax Paper
An Iron
A shirt or shirts or something to apply the print on

Process:

Cut the panty hose down the leg to make a rectangle, then stretch over the embroidery hoop and tighten the hoop as much as you can.


Place the screen print over the image and trace with a pen.


This looks purdy.


Next spread elmer's glue everywhere you don't want to show up. The more coats of glue you do, the better.


With the screen print done, now you can use it. Place cardboard inside of the shirt you are gonna print on, put the screen print on the shirt. Now squrt paint all over the screen print and spread it out with whatever you have. Move the excess paint to the side and lift the screen print. Either do more shirts now or go wash off the screen print with cold water. Let the shirts dry then put wax paper over and under the screen print, iron on low heat to set the paint. Done.


The finished sketchy screen print.

Hope this worked out for you, it is a fun process and an introduction to apperal art. After you use this screen print it may be necessary to apply more glue as it seems to wear off in places. Have fun, go shralp.