My sreenprinted cushion design

Last night I went to a screen-printing workshop at 'super+super' in Brighton. The workshop teaches you how to make a paper stencil to create your own screen-printed cushion cover that you can take home with you. I decided to do a design of a 'Day of the Dead' style sugar skull as I'd already been working on some sketches of this idea.

Tracing and my sketch

On the right (above) is my colour sketch, on the left is my tracing of the design. To make the stencil you trace around your sketch, deciding which bits you want to print (e.g. which bits to cut out). You then cut out the stencil from brown paper with a very sharp scalpel. Its quite tricky because you have to remember not to cut out too many fiddly bits that separate themselves from the main design!

Sketches and finished cushion

To print it you put your cut out stencil on top of the cushion cover but under the screen, then squeegee your colour through the screen...

Then here's the finished cushion!

My finished cushion design

Detail of printed cushion cover

Some other stuff I've made, below.... a couple of cushion covers that I finally got around to making from some old fabric I found in a charity shop. The material was 1 curtain and I bought it basically cos I liked the fabric - I didn't know at first what I wanted to make from it - but I decided it would make a nice couple of cushions, picking out the square parts of the design to make a feature of these parts of the fabric.

Cushions made from retro style fabric

My sugar skull cushion against my retro style cushions.