Printing your own fabric and using it to make cushions, clothes, table cloths etc. can be the best and most joyful experience, but it can just as well be frustrating and hard. Often the things that make it frustrating are easy to solve. In this blog post I will name the top 3 problems in stencil printing that I have encountered personally and have seen happen in my courses over and over again, as well as ways to solve them. These tips refer to my techniques of stencil printing, using the supplies that I use. It may be a bit different if you are using different materials and a different stencil printing technique. You can read about the materials and techniques that I am using in the related blogposts below.
Bleeding
By far the most common problem I see is bleeding of ink underneath the stencil. The reason is most often having too much ink on your brush. Learning what amount of ink to use is the most essential thing in learning to stencil print. You will most probably need far less than you would think. Just very lightly dip your brush in the ink. The ink should only be at the very tip of the brush. And then tap your brush on a surface like a saucer to distribute the ink into the brush and only then take it to the fabric to start printing.
Another reason for bleeding can be the way you hold your brush: if you hold your brush at an angle to the stencil instead of vertical, you will be more likely to push some of the hairs of the brush underneath the stencil and cause bleeding.
Bleeding can also happen when the contour of your stencil has some minor irregularities. These can be places where ink will accumulate and then bleed. The little irregularities of your stencil are often caused by raising your knife while you are cutting and then bringing it down again to continue your cut. I always check for irregularities with my index finger before printing with a stencil for the first time. You can solve this by re-fining the cut.
Staining
Another problem that I often see is staining outside of a stencil. Most often you will see this staining in the same place every time you print. In this case the reason will be that you have some ink underneath your stencil that you are taking from one print to the next. It can also happen when you have taken too much ink as described above and the stencil has touched a wet print. If you use the right amount of ink the back of your stencil will seldom pick up ink, unless you are working on very thin fabric. In that case you need to wait for the previous print to dry, by working around the wet prints, or by using a hair dryer. And otherwise you can always wipe the back of your stencil before a next print.
Not getting an even print
If you are going for an even solid print and find that your prints are blotchy and uneven it may be caused by taking too much ink as described above and not tapping the ink into the brush before printing. You will then apply a lot of ink in one place and less in another.
Another reason may be the fabric you are working on. Some fabrics are simply easier than others to print on. This can be caused by the treatment (sizing) of the fabric. Therefore always wash and iron your fabric before printing, if you are not sure the fabric is ready for printing. Apart from this some fibers take up the ink quickly, for others (like very thin fabrics) the ink lies more on top. If you find it hard to work with your fabric, it is possible that it is not you, but the fabric may be too difficult for your level of experience (in the end you will be able to print on almost all natural fibers).
A third reason can be that you have cut your stencil too large. If the motif you want to print is very large it can be more difficult to get a good even print, it can be better to divide your motif into several different stencils and print with them to get more even prints. In my courses I encourage people to work with stencils that are not much larger than 8 x 8 cm to begin with.
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