Another new string to my bow is t-shirt block printing! It has taken a while and a few wrong turns but I’m so happy with my final results I’m hoping to take it further for the Atelier Boyceau range.

I have stradled this project over two main strands, patterns (of course) and silhouette black & white faces. There always seems to be two clear facets to a lot of my work, staying faithful to texture and ornate shapes, and a strong desire to be modern, fun and bright. I guess it’s the knitter in me versus the youthful girl who loves fashion! No bad thing to have diversity, however I hope this doesn’t detract from the stylistic identity I would like for Atelier Boyceau. The answer will be to carefully combine these elements going forward….

Back to the tees. Once I chose my image and altered it how I wanted I used printer transfer paper to iron on the image. Cue photo:

Atelier Boyceau printed image t-shirt

I used a great image of my sister (she loves it!), however as I feared the image didn’t hold up too well after washing and I really don’t want to sell a sub standard product so I had to rethink. The obvious next step would have been to get some basic screen printing supplies. However I am stuck for space and so chose the (more time consuming) option of block printing. Cue next photos:

lino fabric printing

Stencil

transfering image to lino

Final block

Final block

pre-wash test phase

A few hitches, I had tried with regular acrylic paint but it really doesn’t hold up in the wash so I used screen printing ink. It was too thin at first but then I got better results using a fluffy roller. I did however hand finish the prints to get a darker result. The second image is of me and the Belge if you were wondering 😉 I love the picture and makes me smile! Each t-shirt also has a stamped phrase in French on using a permanent ink stamp.  “bébé d’amour” and “je pense à toi” seemed like fitting phrases for each picture. Cue final results:

All items are now available on my Etsy shop. Vive handmade!!!! 🙂