the fabric printing trials

i put my trusty old print gocco into action early last week and had, yet again, substandard results.



it might look alright in the photo but this is only one of about 20 prints i did, none of which ended up quite how i'd expected. i can never seem to get the quality to the level i want or to that of other gocco prints i've seen online. how do they do it?? i though maybe my screens were the problem. see, i ended up with my gocco through a very generous soul who responded to an ad i put up in the classifieds on craftster. i was searching for a used print gocco and this lovely girl in the states had one sitting around her place unused, she had bought it for $10, a demo model from an art shop that no longer carried them. since she wasn't using it (and never had), she offered to send it to me for the price of shipping only and the promise that i would send her something once i had it up and working. i was blown away by her good crafting spirit and sadly, lost her contact details when i was forced to wipe my computer last year, so have never been able to fulfill my second bit of the bargain. **sniff**

ANYWAY, the unit came with a bunch of inks and a bunch of screens, however most of the screens are special silkscreening specific screens (larger mesh and no plastic sheet to put the ink in between). so i've been kinda silk screening my way along with my prints and thought that maybe the larger mesh was the problem behind the lack of detail. i ordered some proper screens and bulbs last week, picked up a carbon pen from eckersely's on the way home from work on friday, got to work scribbling up a design for a screen and burnt it all up using the finer screen.



and still didn't get quite the results i was after.




maybe i'm expecting too much from the gocco but my screen didn't burn all the way through in some areas and the ink seems to be too thick. arg.

so i'm irritated with the gocco now, tired of wasting ink and good cotton and linen but give me a week or two and i'm sure i will have convinced myself to give it yet another shot. in the meantime, to sooth my printing nerves, i decided to have a go at printing with leaves yesterday afternoon. i remember seeing a post about this on someone's blog at some point in the past 6 months or so but can't remember where... anyway, i picked some leaves, mixed up some of my gocco textile paint into a suitable "leslie" colour, dabbed it onto the leaves with a brush, stuck them on the fabric and gave them a good roll-over and... voila!



finally some sort of printing success. now, while this technique has the potential to look extremely cheesy, i think with select leaves and colours it looks pretty damn good. happy now.