4 days away!!

So my friend Athena and I just got away, kid free for four days!! It was fantastic, we did a 2 and a half day course which was inspiring. Silk screen printing at ACAD in Calgary we built a screen then printed using a stencils and a screen with photo emulsion. I have worked with stencils before and then hand painted them, however using a screen allows you to reuse the stencil and the coating of paint is nice and even.
The instructor was great she really opened my eyes to the possibilities of stencils. I wasn't happy with the quality of photo emulsion image that I produced, my screen was the first screen so the timing with the ultraviolet light was a little off, as a result it was under exposed and started to wash off the screen. Stencils are more what I am interested in and are super easy to clean up after when you are working in a small space at home.

Of course we couldn't go to the Big Smoke and not do some shopping, I was happy to come home with a new dress, belt, shirt (which I printed on) and shoes, then something for my fellas, and finally Ikea for the house and a fun mirror for Rio with doors so he can play peeka boo with himself, so cute.

Here are some of the my favorite prints:
The Blue t-shirt is done with 1 stencil and blobs of 2 colours, pulling the squeegee down the screen makes this effect. The green t-shirt is actually 2 different stencils. This stencil was super quick, these weren't the best prints as one of the cars looks stripy, this was caused by putting newspaper over the print so I could print another one beside it before it had dried. The paint that had touched the newspaper dried differently from the paint that didn't, interesting effect. I didn't want to waste them so turned them into bean filled bookends.