the blogger in me

as seen in the Color Factory shop, an experience I wrote about here

On Sunday this blog turned 18. Leading up to October 2005 (a year that included marriage, a cross-country move, and the start of grad school), I'd been manually updating my website at the time with some regularity, but sadly, I didn't think then to archive that material in any way (it may be saved somewhere but that was several laptops ago). It was the earlyish, more ephemeral days of the world wide web. Here are my top 18 posts of all time:

1. pay for it: The first time my family encountered lice, not long after the Hamilton craze began, I wrote a parody of Wait For It. It is my most-viewed blog post of all time.

2. & 3. Up next, two posts about the making of my podcast, here and here. I wonder how much of the information in the second post is already obsolete? I guess I'll find out if and when I revive the podcast for season 2!

4. Fresh from the Makery: Eli's Bedtime, in which I wrote about the felt bedtime chart I made for my then ~3yo son. I still have it although I've since repurposed the stretcher bars (the chart is rolled up and stored in my studio).

5. book deal dreams, in which I recap the first of two years of "unemployment-by-choice" between August 2017 to September 2019. Still no book deal.

6. Another "fresh from the Makery" post, this one about the Mothers Cookies inspired felt ornaments I made.

7. Always surprised to see how many views this Makery project has: recycled denim coffee cozy.

8. This was a fun project: embroidered summer constellation flashcards. Want to make some of your own? Click on and save/download the images (4 total) at the end of this post (it may take some trial and error to print them correctly front and back so apologies in advance that I can't help you there).

9. I wouldn't be the first one to liken running an Etsy shop circa early 2010s to having your own personal sweat shop but here I bemoan the downsides of the paper punches I used in a lot of my wedding invitation designs at the time, with a totally unrelated Britney reference thrown in for good measure.

10. On a similar note, in this popular (relatively speaking) post I describe the steep learning curve that was the Yudu (I still have it although I haven't used it in years). So insane to look back at those pictures and recall that I started my micro-biz in a 2-bedroom apartment I shared with my husband, toddler son, and two cats.

11. The felt Android phone cozy (version 2.0)!

12. Tie-dye crayons, another project from the Makery. This project is such an easy crowd-pleaser and a great way to use up all those little crayon pieces.

13. Faux swirl lollipops using pipe cleaners for one of the fussier invitation designs I dreamed up during my Etsy days. I mocked up this design for my son's 3rd birthday party.

14. If I ever go back to school to get my PhD my dissertation will be about The Last Unicorn. This post is really just a plot synopsis but the older I get the more I think I understand why I thought about that movie so often while working on my MFA thesis. It's on a long list of possible blog topics I keep so perhaps I'll write more about it here one day (and yes, another Britney reference in that title).

15. That time I opted to quit after years of grit and spent a lot less time on my Etsy shop/micro-biz in favor of a "real job." 

16. During my Etsy years I trained for and ran the Oakland marathon and as part of my fundraising efforts I raffled off various items that were donated to me by fellow, mostly local, Etsy shops. Why the item I raffled off on the 9th of 12 days is my 16th most viewed post is beyond me but here it is.

17. I never did sell or get these items back from the store I'd sent them to on consignment, the first and last time I tried out that arrangement.

18. Finally, not unlike #16, a random post from the pandemic diaries: week 12, during which we broke quarantine to go hang out in the desert.

Now for those constellation flashcards I promised you - enjoy!

fresh from the Makery: YuDu, round two

After posting my initial review of the YuDu home screenprinting machine, I had the opportunity to do another primarily text-based invitation order. Now, the only reason I was willing to even try this project via YuDu after all the difficulty I had the first time around is because the client wanted, once again, silver ink on dark card stock (impossible with the standard flat printing I typically offer). Otherwise, I really don't recommend screenprinting for fine text - flat printing is always going to look crisper and if you want a little something extra in the printing department you might as well investigate thermography, engraving, or letterpress. Well, once again, despite claiming victory over machine in that first review, I ran into much of the same problems, mainly getting the emulsion on just right. My screen wasn't wet enough so I tried to spot treat it with my fine mist spray bottle but then the screen was too wet, my emulsion got all drippy, and half of my image wouldn't rinse out (meaning half of it wouldn't print). I ended up modifying the design so we could go with flat printing instead, feeling slightly defeated and disappointed that I wasn't able to provide this client with exactly what she was looking for.

However, right after that order, while her graduation announcement text was still half-assedly burned onto my 220 mesh screen, I started work on a wedding invitation order that included a patterned wrap with the right idea as far as design but whose colors were all wrong. So I bravely proposed using my YuDu to create a customized version in the form of a two-color butterfly pattern screenprinted on a lightweight colored wrapping paper, all of which I was able to match to the colors in the client's wedding palette after a couple of print proofs.

(What a difference printing the lighter color over the darker color makes, huh?)

I determined that it's really best to get your screen wet enough (but not too wet) before you apply your sheet of emulsion. So once again, I thoroughly wet my screen in the sink, let it drip dry for a minute or two, then dabbed it with a paper towel so there were no drippy areas. Of course, now the screen was too dry, so once it was on the YuDu, I took my wet sponge and went over both sides in both directions (horizontally and vertically across the screen). There's pretty much no way this will make your screen drippy but it will ensure there's water in each and every little hole. Applying the emulsion was no problem this time around, and I did it twice, back to back, since I was using both of my 110 mesh screens for this two-color job. There was some webbing on one of the screens but toward the edge, leaving plenty of space for my 8 1/2 by 11 inch design. I didn't fuss with the water bottle this time and that seemed to do the trick.

As you can see, my design is a lot bigger and bolder than the text-based project I blogged about before, so my 110 mesh screens worked just fine this time around (I highly recommend getting yourself a 220 mesh screen for anything with fine detail, although you can see the line-based butterflies printed as well as the solid silhouettes in this case). I still had a little bit of difficulty with the YuDu brand printing ink. I'm finding that the viscosity is really inconsistent depending on the color, and it annoys me that they don't have a cyan/magenta/yellow kit (which, with "k", or black, provide the basic building blocks of printing a full range of colors...yes, I am a certified member of the cult of CMYK). But, as we learned with the last order, non-YuDu brand inks, of course, work just fine. I actually ended up using a weird mix of colors and inks to match the "plum" and "grape" colors used elsewhere in this couple's invitation ensemble.

One thing I added to my YuDu arsenal this time around was yet another squeegee. YuDu must be reading the reviews (you may remember I was a little snobby about the pathetic piece of plastic they pass off as a squeegee in the kit that comes with the machine), because they've come out with a "pro" squeegee. The non-YuDu brand squeegee I bought for the last order was a little too flimsy for this one. The YuDu brand "pro" squeegee was a nice compromise between the basic squeegee that comes with the machine (which is completely rigid) and the squeegee I bought for the last order. Since I'm printing much larger areas of solid color with this order, I needed something a bit more rigid. The YuDu "pro" squeegee worked really well in this case.

Who knows how the next project will go. Just when you think you've mastered it, something goes wrong. But I'm sure, like anything, more practice will bring me a little closer to YuDu perfection.

fresh from the Makery: taming the wild beast that is The Yudu

As a regular reader of this blog may remember, I used to do a lot of screenprinting back in grad school. It's certainly possible to recreate the kind of setup I had at back at school here at home, but it takes a few resources that I don't readily have access to, namely space and a hacker's mentality. So when the YuDu screenprinting machine came out last year I was immediately jonesing to get my hands on one, despite mixed reviews. And let me tell you, the mixed reviews are pretty justified. But after several weeks and more money than I made on the order that prompted me to finally unbox the YuDu I received for my birthday last October, I feel a bit like I just broke the spirit of a wild stallion.

After skimming most of the Amazon reviews, I knew the included instructions and DVD were mostly useless. I didn't even look at the DVD but I will say the one-page pamphlet (only in pamphlet form because it's replicated in about half-a-dozen languages) seems useful as a visual reminder of the steps necessary to prep and print your design. I did, however, look at about a gazillion different blog posts and video tutorials online from folks like me working their way through the YuDu's steep learning curve. A couple of my favorites include Erin Bassett's blog and video tutorials, found here and here, and Journal Girl. I looked at so many tutorial videos and blog posts that I honestly can't recall every little tip I picked up but it does help to do some anecdotal research online before you begin. Let the YuDu trailblazers shorten the learning curve a bit!

So with the disclaimer that the YuDu is not exactly as easy as they'd like you to believe, here's what I found to work for me. As just about every blogger and reviewer has complained the hardest part about YuDu is applying the emulsion sheets just right. If you don't know much about screenprinting, let me break it down for you this way. Basically, YuDu wants you to bend the laws of physics and will lead you to believe that this is a laughably easy thing to do. It's not. They've created the emulsion sheets so that you don't have to deal with the mess of liquid emulsion, from adding the sensitizer to applying a thin layer of the stuff to your screen using a scoop-coater. We had a whole room for this part of the process back in grad school. So that's cool. But now you're trying to do something in solid form that's ideally applied as a liquid. The way you do this is with the magic of water, but just how much water is on your screen is the difference between you turning into a frustrated sobbing mess (okay, if you're not a sleep-deprived parent of a young toddler, maybe it won't be that bad) and happily printing your t-shirts and what-have-you.

The official instructions are to wet your screen so that it's damp but not dripping. What I found to work, after removing emulsion from one of the first three failed attempts, was to sort of pat my recently rinsed screen with a paper towel. Any drippy bits will make your emulsion run and where it runs it won't "burn" the image properly, but if it's too dry the more or less solid emulsion goo won't work its way into the itty-bitty holes of your screen's mesh. So once your screen is damp but not drippy I found that it helped to run a wet (again, not super duper drippy wet but wet enough to get water in each and every hole) sponge over both sides of the screen. Right after you do this, pull a sheet of emulsion out and lay it, tacky side down, shiny side up, on the side of the screen where the mesh is flush with the metal frame. I started at the top and let the emulsion kind of work its way down. Use the "squeegee" (I put this in quotes because I have to be a snob on this point...I'll talk more about this later but do yourself a favor and get a real squeegee at your local art store or online) to sort of smooth/flatten the sheet of emulsion. You can take a look at the other side of your screen to check for any webbing or areas where the emulsion is not attached properly. If you need to do some spot treatment, I found that using a fine-mist spray bottle sparingly over the problem area helped (spray on the underside, followed by another smoothing over with the squeegee on the top, where your emulsion is protected with a sheet of acetate). But again, use caution because if you're too generous with the spray bottle, as I was during one of my first failed attempts, the emulsion will run and your image won't burn properly. One of the best tips I got from Journal Girl, above, is to put the screen in the drying rack shiny side down. And let it dry for at least three cycles. Some folks recommend speeding up this process with a hair dryer but I found this to be unsuccessful because the air moved around the drops on my too-wet screen and caused the emulsion to, you guessed it, run.

During one of my first three attempts at mastering the art of emulsion application I got enough of my design to burn to do a test print, which led me to the realization (something I should have already known from three years of grad school) that the 110 mesh screen that comes with the YuDu machine wasn't going to be fine enough to print text (turns out legibility is kind of an essential quality in a wedding invitation). So I took about a week off from YuDu learning curve anxiety while I waited for a 220 mesh screen to arrive. If you're doing anything with fine detail, do yourself a favor and get a 220 mesh screen. Don't even bother with the 110; reserve that for larger, bolder graphics as I plan to do with the two screens I have.

Another thing that I remembered from grad school while waiting for the 220 mesh screen was that we'd always "de-grease" a new screen before applying emulsion for the first time. So I gave this a whirl, applying a tiny drop of dishsoap (I think we used laundry detergent in grad school but I'm not sure it matters) to my new screen and rinsing that out thoroughly since I wanted it to be wet anyway. And who knows if it was coincidence (third time's a charm?) but this go-round I applied the sheet of emulsion to my screen no problem, other than a couple of small glitches around the edges. I left it in the drawer for three dry cycles before I even took a look and sure enough, the acetate came off without any problems (if you start to peel the acetate away and it sticks at all, stop what you're doing and put your screen back in the dryer for another cycle, otherwise you could tear your emulsion).

While my screen was drying, of course, I had plenty of time to get the transparency I'd had printed for awhile (first at Kinko's since my old printer wouldn't print transparencies then a revised version on my new inkjet printer, tweaking the font a bit to optimize printing results) on the light table. Burning the screen was pretty straight-forward: once emulsion is dry remove acetate, place screen on posts emulsion-side down, place t-shirt platen on platen posts felt side down, add about 5 pounds (I added a two-pound weight to my box of YuDu supplies and ink and that seemed to do the trick) to the top of the t-shirt platen and hit the expose button. I let it go the entire 8 minutes although I have read that you may want to dial down the exposure a bit to pick up finer detail. I may try this with any future text-based projects.

When the 8 minutes is up, remove your screen from the YuDu machine and immediately rinse it with cool water. The emulsion blocked from the light by the design on your transparency should rinse away; I found it was necessary to gently rub the screen to get the emulsion goo to really budge and wash through. You want all the emulsion out, of course, so your ink can pass through. Having mastered the art of emulsion application, you'd think my journey to success was through. But wait, there's more. After rinsing and yet again waiting a bit for my screen to dry, I taped off the areas between the emulsion and the frame and eagerly set out to pull a solid print. Unfortunately, I found YuDu inks straight out of the bottle to be too thick to pass through the finer holes of the 220 mesh, prompting a trip to the art store to purchase a different brand of screenprinting ink, some extender, and a proper squeegee.

Here's my squeegee post printing.  You can see that I used a plastic palette knife (you can find these in the painting section) to mix my ink and reclaim it during and after printing (the ink builds up on the squeegee so it's helpful to scrape it off every couple of prints and apply it right back on your screen).

Using my new squeegee and Versatex ink yielded pretty good results, not exactly what I was looking for but way better than anything I'd printed on the YuDu thus far. Unfortunately, the silver I was able to find on short notice wasn't quite the silver I'd promised my client so I tried again adding a bit of extender (probably about 3 parts YuDu ink to 1 part extender, roughly - I basically just aimed to copy the viscosity of the Versatex ink). You can find these little plastic containers in just about any art or craft supply store so that you can mix and save enough ink for an entire print run.

YuDu ink + extender + new squeegee = success!

I don't recommend using a fruit bowl or kitchen counter as a drying rack, but sometimes your options are limited.  Limited drying space aside, I also noticed the screen was getting a bit over-flooded with ink after about a dozen prints.  Fortunately, this was a small order so I was able to print about double what I actually needed before I had to call it quits and rinse my screen out, but I would imagine, especially considering how long it seems to take the screen to dry each time, that this will get annoying on future orders.  It happens with any style of screenprinting but I definitely got more than a dozen prints from the screens and setup I had in grad school.

And the finished product?

I figure if I can print wedding invitations with this thing (not exactly what it was designed to do), I can print just about anything....Right??