Screen Printing With Tie-Dye Dyes?

Not everything we try works the first time. Or even if it does work, it doesn't always work the way we hoped/wanted/expected. We share even those things hoping that as we test the boundaries, your imagination will be caught or that you will know a little bit more about screen printing.

We tried screen printing with tie dye powder. We used a similar method to our bleach shirt trial from earlier.

Watch the Video:

Testing Tie Dye Powder in Screen Printing

We made a corn starch gel (see the post linked above), then instead of adding bleach we split up the batch to make different colors with tie dye powder.

We then did a couple of prints using the colored gel. The tie dye kit we had included about 1 tablespoon of powder for each color. We used all of the powder for each color we tried. Had to add a splash of water to each of our colors to get them to mix in properly.

Then positioned our EZScreen on a shirt and pressed the gel-tie-dye mixture through the screen printing stencil into the fibers of the shirt.

Once each shirt was printed, we let them sit for 24 hours (just like tie-dye) before rinsing them out and washing them.

Result

Turns out that we didn't have enough dye in the mixture to get the effect we were after. We were hoping for clear crisp lines and colors that popped. However, the colors were faint and soft. The lines were ok, so the design was recognizable.

We are going to try some more things in the future to get a good color print that doesn't add any weight to the shirt so we can go hiking in the desert without the printed area of our shirts making us hot and sweaty.