PhotoEz - a bag, and some tips - a quick tutorial making a first screen printed t-shirt

OK, not that I am an expert or anything (since I have had the kit for all of about three days, and been peppering Solmu with questions - oh, and heads up Solmu, there's another PM heading your way shortly! ).

But, I have just done my first three colour print with my PhotoEz kit, and I think it turned out pretty well, so I wanted to:
a) Show off
b) Tell people what I did, hoping it helps others!

I apologise in advance if any of you are upset about breastfeeding stuff, but it happens to be my best selling design, so that's what I'm printing. The ink colours do not match my original, because atm I'm using craft paints mixed with textile medium. I'm hoping to order some "proper" gear next week.

So, step by step.
This is a picture of the current design I was aiming to print:


The first thing I did was to separate the design into colours.

You'll notice because I'm a touch lazy, I've only done two screens not three - the olive in the martini is included in the "It's my drink" screen. I'll explain how I still ended up with the three colours later.

Printing out of Photoshop, I selected to add "Crop Marks" to the print out. Then I exposed each print out.

The crop marks ended up as "ghost images" on the screen, so I used an box cutter to put slits through each screen at each of the eight marks.

I laid down the first screen (the one with the martini) onto the onesie, and then used a sewing marker to draw a line on each of the eight marks. Sewing markers are neat little things that you can use to "draw" on fabric, but wash out very easily with tap water. You could equally use sewing chalk on a dark coloured garment. Here is the onesie with the crop marks, and my first layer of ink:


I blow dried the paint using a hair dryer until it was "touch dry" before laying down the second screen. Then I used the registration marks to line up the second screen, and printed the yellow ink on. After that, I again blow dried the yellow ink, washed the second screen, dried it out and lined it up again to do the green in the olive. This only worked because the olive was kind of isolated, and I wasn't incredibly fussy about it overlaying the cocktail skewer too much.



Then I washed the registration marks off using tap water. I was impatient, so the shirt below hasn't been dried before I took the picture (hence it looks a little out of shape!).



There are some obvious flaws - I've laid down a little too much paint, and the olive is missing it's hole in the middle (again, probably because of too much paint). I think this is largely due to poor technique (as I said, I've only had the kit for a few days, and this is my first attempt at screen printing anything), and possibly a little due to "make shift" materials in using craft paint rather than "proper" screen printing ink.

However, if you don't require incredibly precise registration and are only doing a small number of garments, it's a nice "poor man's" way to get a several colour print onto a shirt! __________________