Geometric dinosaur tri-al

I've been neck deep in block printing experiments this last 9 months so please tolerate the upcoming flood of enthusiastic posts.

Spotlight has now started stocking speedball ink and a variety of supplies and ArtRiot had a buy $40, get $40 sale so I now have a goodly stockpile of various things to experiment with. First up is the Speedball Screen Printing Ink. This is sold in a four pack of black, red, blue and yellow at Spotlight for reasonable prices. I also bought white because I like the idea of white block printing then overdying with indigo sometime in the near future.

To test the ink I hand painted another geometric dinosaur. The paint is designed to be pushed through a screen print frame. As a result, it's quite sticky and will need thinning before being used in block printing.

If at first you don't succeed, tri, tri again.

The tricerotops on the left was painted with a flat bruch while the one on the right used a tapered round. The paint was easier to load on the tapered round and i didn't need to go over the lines as much. As a result, the lines are less fluffy. I like the frill on the one on the right, it's a much cleaner head and I'm alot happier with it.

En-raptored with geometrics

An experiment with hand painting geometric dinosaurs. I'm not 100% happy with the feet but the idea is sound and I'd like to apply it to a variety of other dino's.

The pale yellow halo is actually talc powder which I've used to transfer the outline of my design onto a black polo shirt. The method works really well but has the possibility of gumming up the paintbrush if too much powder is free to move. It brushes off easily once the paint is ironed though.

Polo shirt adaptions

While avoiding work one afternoon, I stumbled upon a tutorial on how to make polo shirts more interesting. It was linked from Threadbanger, one of my many crafting-procrastination sites. It's by 'Mark your Mark' and you can find it here. I decided to give it a try, because I like the way my boy looks in a polo shirt and the Australian sun has bleached his only one to an unflattering grey colour. So after visiting my sister for her birthday, I popped into Kmart and made a few over my christmas break. (I have yet to find a place selling poloshirts for girls, without pockets, at decent prices - as soon as I do I'll make a heap for myself too. If I retain my enthusiasm, I might even make over a couple of business shirts).

They are rather easy to do, and I have plenty of fabric scraps that are suitable for this project. Though, I'll admit, I used this as an experience to rifle through Spotlights quilting section and bought some more fabric. I ended up making three for the boy. The first, a pirate placket and pirate pocket one unfortunatly was a little tight, Kmart's fault not mine. The second was a pirate placket and an applique skull and cross bones. The third was this:

A cute monster design, from which I made a pocket and placket (I love the way the monster on the placket peeks out at you). The pocket is a little too far to the left as I didn't get him to try it on while making it 'cause I made them for Christmas. The rest since then have been perfect. By rest, I mean I got a little carried away with the fabric stash and made a bunch of them. I have now opened an Etsy shop to divest myself of finished projects such as these. I'll be uploading random items that I've crafted and have no use for over the coming weeks. The hard part is taking good photos of the items and writing a description that isn't simply "It's done and I need the space, please buy it".