Hand Printing Experiments

I stayed up late last night making more block prints and stenciled work. After a trip to Michael's, where I discovered a fabric paint from Tulip; Soft Fabric Paint - that needs no heat setting (!) , I sat down and had to try it out. Of course, when you do these things they always take longer than you think. That's why I was up until 2:30!

Here's the first print with the Tulip Soft; the red flowers are block printed with Tulip Soft and the blue bird is a rubber carved block print with fabric screenprinting ink.

I like the lost and found edges of the hand printed flowers. In a closeup of the bird, you can see

the loss of detail that I think comes from the use of the thinner screenprinting ink.

This fabric is also quite a tight weave, which is nice for holding detail and makes for a crisp and polished tea towel when folded, pressed and laid on a breakfast tray beside your brioche.

I also block printed on a looser weave flour sack towel. You can see the level of detail is much lower, and this lends a rustic, authentic feeling to the towel.

and a close up-

In addition to the flat weaves, I tried printing on a waffle weave towel, with surprising success. I'll be test driving these towels myself to see how they perform. I really like how the colors work together and the graphic style reminds me a little of a scandinavian look.

I played around with some other ideas and made some test prints, but didn't print whole designs with these images yet-

I'm a huge fan of mid-century, danish modern style (funny, because for many years I hated that look with a passion!) , and I've got lots of ideas how I want to incorporate that into some new designs.

In addition to the block printing, I'm still working on more intricate designs that I'll actually screenprint the images myself. Hopefully, those with get finished soon. That will be a fun challenge and I'll be sure to blog on that when the time comes. 

Let me know what you think in the comments section. Do you have any favorite color combinations? I struggle with that sometimes, and I love to hear what other people think. Tell me what your favorite images or styles are. You might open my mind to some new ideas I've never thought of before!