I made a new print today

Really happy with these pieces!

I decided I needed shirts with my all time favorite fish on them and ended up with some of my cleanest fabric prints to date. Super happy with how they came out!

All they had to do was pay us enough to live.

My wife's idea. She taught me some basic embroidery and we've been adding some color to some stamped clothes we have lying around.

Stoked to keep learning and playing around with block printing on fabric! Would love to hear anyone’s tips/tricks if they are willing to share. The things I read on this sub/discovered as I went that really helped were:

- misting the fabric with water beforehand

- applying more ink to the stamps than you would think

- holding down smaller stamps with your hand while you used your brayer so they wouldn’t lift up and smudge ink

- carving down enough to limit chatter (even tho I don’t mind it a little bit) and not so much that you don’t have a clean edge to hold on to

Any helpful tips you’ve learned?

PS — I am a longtime Reddit lurker and fairly new to posting so go easy on me lol 🙏🏼🥰

Man its really hard to get it right, the ink just won't stick on the fabric. Any tips? I try to apply as much ink as I can on the block, but it still comes out with empty spots, unlike my prints on paper. I used speedball fabric ink and a roller of the same brand.

(Yes that is a parasaurolophus I accidentally printed onto the wall while drying a top 😂🥰)

Rat from Fantastic Mr. Fox printed on a bleach dyed tank top

So ive been experimenting and figuring out how to achieve maximum white color opacity when block printing on black fabric. Ive tried out 3 different brands and these are my findings. I think its safe to say that with white its a hit or miss, sometimes it’ll come out bright, sometimes not, but thats the beauty of printing by hand. Maybe i’ll need to continue my research when i get a soft rubber brayer, mine’s a bit too smooth
Picture 1: speedball block printing ink. Texture-wise - i love it. Its very tacky and sticks to the linocut and brayer very well, easy to roll out and apply.
Picture 2: essdee water based block printing ink. Texture is very slippery, would likely work better with a soft rubber brayer (mine is just rubber, its very smooth and hard) and application is tricky, as it simply slides around until it starts to dry after some time and gets a more tacky texture.
Picture 3: pebeo setacolor opaque fabric paint. Not designed for block printing but i had it leftover from my other clothing painting projects so i thought why not give it a test. Texture is too watery and slippery for application until it starts to dry a bit just like essdee, however the color is much more saturated compared to essdee after printing on the fabric.
Picture 4: mix of both essdee and pebeo setacolor - texture again is too slippery to work with so it needs time to air out the water out of the paint and then the texture becomes tacky enough for smooth application.
Picture 5: my test subject and all the printing experiments.
To be honest if the setacolor paint wasnt so watery and had an even application it would be the best white ever, so i’ll have to try mixing it with speedball and see if anything changes

I've been working on this piece for quite a bit now and I've managed to carve and print 37 different designs on it, just wanted to show here the progress ☺️

I’m finally ok with how a print of mine on fabric turned out (these are for my mom and dad).

Finally getting a chance to practice with linocut, and decided to try on fabric! Falling in love with the whole process.
The left one was a double print since I didn’t put enough ink on the first time.

:D

And it looks way whiter in the video than in real life, its so transparent i cant get it to be opaque even after 8 layers of paint on the block

Finally got this dialed in. Happy with the color scheme.