Today we finally printed some patches, though we had mixed results and only made a small batch of successful ones. Here's what we learned:

1. white ink, particularly very opaque white ink, dries really fast and clogs up the screens. I guess it's hard for them to make it opaque so they have to put more pigment in it or something. Next time we're gonna add retarder.

2. coarse fabric doesn't absorb the ink properly. finding the right fabric is essential.

3. if you make too many passes with the squeegee, the ink will bleed through too much and get all over the other side. When this happens, you either gotta make a few prints on paper to run off the excess or wash of the screen and start all over. it sucks...

4. when you burn the screen, there should be a good sized border around the printable area, otherwise it's hard to squeegee (especially the tops and bottoms)

Self education = learning shit the hard way. Now we have that much more knowledge. I think it was a combination of these four things that made it very difficult to diagnose the problem at first - in the same pass, some patches were coming out too heavy and some barely at all. Next time we'll do better.

all this reinforces our plans to create our own silkscreen space. if we could work with oil based ink we wouldn't have to worry about drying, plus we'd be able to scrape it all back in the container and reuse it later. and if we had space for a woodshop (and some money for a table saw) we could make the screens ourselves, which would save us a fortune. plus we could be there all the time, and I'm sure we'd get the hang of it a lot faster if we could just spend one solid day in the right kind of facility. getting this space requires filling this house we're looking at. I wrote all about it in another thread.