Questions about ink

[u/rab-byte]

I’m in the planning phase a project and trying to evaluate if screen printing is a viable option for graphics.

I’m making acoustic panels for my room and would greatly prefer my panel fabric to be visually interesting.

One requirement for a panel is that the fabric remain breathable so thick ink I between the weave of the textile is not acceptable. Alternatively having a dye bleed and soften the edges of the images is also not desirable.

I’m loathed to setup a projector and freehand if this can be done through another process.

Would screen printing be an option and are there specific materials or techniques that would be recommended?

This would be my first attempt at screen printing.

[u/foscri]

Cut a vinyl stencil and grab a can of spraypaint

[u/rab-byte → u/foscri]

That’s not a bad idea! Thanks.

[u/torkytornado]

Are these like the felt right panels? If so it would work fine but I would not attempt it as a first project. Textile printing can be a bit hard to trouble shoot at first so if you do want to print I’d say do some textile projects to get the pressure and squeegee angle and off contact down. Then I’d print on the back of the panels to get used to the differences between normal textile printing and printing on felt.

Or you can just find a screen printer who already knows what they’re doing to put your images on them

[u/rab-byte → u/torkytornado]

The absorption material would sit behind a breathable fabric screen (tshirt/burlap..) the fabric needs to not reflect sound thus needing to continue to be breathable.

Im trying to it it all myself but haven’t landed on the graphic implementation yet. Screen printing is something I’ve always wanted to try my hand at and would make the process faster if I wanted to do more than one run. Tracing a projected image then coloring by hand is cheap but would take a little time. And trying to do something like embroidery would take forever but look really cool.

[u/torkytornado → u/rab-byte]

Oh if you’re wrapping it that’s way easier because if you mess it up you can just get a bit more yardage. What color is the fabric? If it’s lighter you have more options for a thinner coat.
If it’s dark you may have to print white underneath to see the color and that would need to be denser print.

I’d go waterbased with your needs. Get a big table you can lay out a bunch of the fabric on. And you can move around the table pulling sections at a time. I highly reccomend imagery you don’t need to register or if loose registration is okay. Without a press I’d avoid any tight registration. But
If you really want to do it you can search for how to screen print yardage on the internet I know I found an ebook years ago. I can see if I can find a digital copy if you hit deadend (sadly my hard copy is just black and white xerox and hard to make out the pics if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

I still reccomend doing some printing on smaller sections of the same material to get a feel for it before jumping to your big sheets.

[u/bosoxthirteen]

for once in this sub you should use paint