Choosing favorites

Here are my 13 favorites from the 40 or so napkins I've printed in my latest print runs. I like the colors as well as the printed designs. I have more playing around to do with color combinations, but I find I like both the high contrast of black/lighter color as well as the lower contrast of two shades of the same color (turquoise in upper right, rust in center of the bottom row).

I mentioned in the last post that I was going to try making a second screen from a screen, in order to get more of a line drawing effect. I did this with the screen on which I'd written text, and I'm happy with how it turned out.  The original screen was used for the navy napkin on the right, below. The lettering drawn on the screen with matte medium served as a resist, so the text appears in the light blue of the original fabric; the added dye becomes the background.  I printed this twice, first with dark blue, then turned the screen 90 degrees and printed with medium blue, which is why you see three shades of blue on the napkin.  Then I used that screen as a "stencil," pulling matte medium through it onto another screen.  That makes a new screen where the background is coated with the resist, and the letters are clear for the dye to be pulled through.  For the napkin on the left, I started with magenta fabric, and did two pulls with black dye.  I like that it looks kind of like an ancient inscription, somewhat worn away.

Out of the 40 napkins, there are 34 I like well enough to either use myself or give them away.  Here they all are. You'll see that I also tried out a red-white combination that didn't make it into my "favorites" group. I really like the idea of red/white, but there was back-staining of the red dye onto the white fabric, so the results are more like red and pale-pink.  I think I'll probably overdye them a light rust color, to get rid of the pink.  If I had thought ahead, I might have avoided the backstaining, but the process to do that involves soaking twice with lots of ice cubes, which I don't want to have to build into my routine.

In the top row on the left are two napkins where the bowl design was pulled once; on the right it was pulled twice.  In the end, I prefer it pulled once--which conveniently is less work for me.

I will be taking a break from this for a while, to finish my online Photoshop course, where I hope to come up with some additional screen designs.  I like all of these, but found I got a little bored repeating just these half-dozen screen.