Screenprinted Map Fabric for Cabaret
Mar. 11th, 2013 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labricoleuseIn our ongoing look at my co-crafts artisan Candy McClernan's surface design work for Cabaret, today we depart from the realm of digitally printed Deutschmarks and dirigibles to focus on screenprinting.
See, we needed for this project to be able to put a pattern on milliskin, which is super stretchy and not a fabric available from a place like Spoonflower. Spoonflower does a cotton jersey, but that wasn't going to work for the design in question (pictured below). Granted, we did look into the possibility of consulting with [TC]2 on an engineered print project, and also at places that do digitally printed stretch products like Agon Swimwear. Ultimately though, when all the factors of cost vs. time vs. labor were taken into consideration, we decided that doing it the old-fashioned way was going to be the best choice.
Costume design for the Kit Kat Girls in the Entr'Acte, by Jennifer Caprio
Draper and Costume Director Judy Adamson created this initial mockup of the design.
(Candy is also responsible for that swastika "belt buckle," which is made from Wonderflex.)
Jen gave us this image of a map by Groenbjerg as an example of the map aesthetic she liked,
except she wanted ours to be black and white. Candy created the black and white map
in Photoshop and printed it on a large-format printer at the desired scale.
Meanwhile, Judy marked out her pattern pieces on the milliskin.
Candy split the image up into sections and burned screens using the EZScreen product,
which is pre-saturated with photoemulsion. With EZScreen on a sunny day,
you can expose a screen in five minutes!
Here she's checking her registration to match the print from one screen to the next.
This shows a bunch of torsos and two bust cups at top right waiting for their ink to dry.
We then had some assistants heat-set the print and now, the fabric's back in Judy's hands for cutting and stitching.
Now, there's a lot more that has to happen before these screenprints become costumes, but that's where we're at!
See, we needed for this project to be able to put a pattern on milliskin, which is super stretchy and not a fabric available from a place like Spoonflower. Spoonflower does a cotton jersey, but that wasn't going to work for the design in question (pictured below). Granted, we did look into the possibility of consulting with [TC]2 on an engineered print project, and also at places that do digitally printed stretch products like Agon Swimwear. Ultimately though, when all the factors of cost vs. time vs. labor were taken into consideration, we decided that doing it the old-fashioned way was going to be the best choice.
Costume design for the Kit Kat Girls in the Entr'Acte, by Jennifer Caprio
Draper and Costume Director Judy Adamson created this initial mockup of the design.
(Candy is also responsible for that swastika "belt buckle," which is made from Wonderflex.)
Jen gave us this image of a map by Groenbjerg as an example of the map aesthetic she liked,
except she wanted ours to be black and white. Candy created the black and white map
in Photoshop and printed it on a large-format printer at the desired scale.
Meanwhile, Judy marked out her pattern pieces on the milliskin.
Candy split the image up into sections and burned screens using the EZScreen product,
which is pre-saturated with photoemulsion. With EZScreen on a sunny day,
you can expose a screen in five minutes!
Here she's checking her registration to match the print from one screen to the next.
This shows a bunch of torsos and two bust cups at top right waiting for their ink to dry.
We then had some assistants heat-set the print and now, the fabric's back in Judy's hands for cutting and stitching.
Now, there's a lot more that has to happen before these screenprints become costumes, but that's where we're at!
