Commission

Last week my brother commissioned me to make a bag, a wrislet and a mini pouch which he needs by tomorrow. Luckily for me I managed to finish them today without any major mishap.

I used my foam stamps for the red on white pattern.

More stamped pattern on the other side.

Instead of making my usual tote, I added a pleat, a single long strap and gusset.

All boxed up and waiting for pick-up!

Stamped pouch

Pouch #29

Remember this stamped print?

A tag and repeats

The Man and The Tween helped me design a name card for TiMi sale at The Bearded Lady. I wanted it as simple as possible. so I'm really happy with how it turned out. Also stuck some onto Ikea gift tags for the bags I had for sale.

With The Man away on a job, I have not been able to do any printing with the silkscreens. Not to be deterred, I experimented with the stamps I made some months ago. Pretty me thinks :)

That's Cat waiting for some attention. He's a real sweetie when he's not out hunting down birds, frogs and lizards. Ish!

Before the pillows...

At The Bearded Lady I had four See No Evil pillows for sale. I wanted to make bags first but I only got as far as the prototype made from this sketch a few months ago back when it was still 2013. 

It took us 9 times to finally get the screen burnt just right. Here is one of the first few prints we did. The top half of the banana tree bled out a fair bit. My guess is I put too much pressure when I was pulling the squeegee.

The Toddler couldn't resist touching the bag when we were printing and smudged it a bit. Here she is trying to get her hands on it again! :)

There's a red blob on the woman's sleeve because I was about to start painting when I realized I should take a before photo first.

For the other side of the bag, I printed three words from the Japanese proverb of the Three Wise Monkeys "See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil" and crossed them out in red.

The words are in Malay but written in Jawi which is an Arabic alphabet.. 

The top is lihat = see. The middle is dengar = hear and the bottom is kata = speak.

Here I am painting in the details on another print we did. Just to give you an idea of the process.

At last, after all the sweat and near-tears here is the final version of the bag with painted details in red. I also made a tote version. Will share a picture with you soon.

Cheers! :)

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who came by The Bearded Lady yesterday. I had a fantastic time catching up with my old friends R.W and C.C who came to visit and support handmade. It's been ages since we sat down for a chat. Years actually! 

A special thank you to The Bearded Lady for inviting Timitimitonga to set up shop for the day. Spent the time munching off their menu! The Nasi Lemak was lip-smacking delicious, cooked specially for the event by Aniz's mother. Me and the Tween ordered it twice. Also loved TBL's Croissant Sumbat which we will have to go again for more.

Now for some pictures...

Oi! bags and wristlets.

More bags and wristlets. 

Thanks R for the wonderful arrangement.

And... the See No Evil pillows also arranged for better photo-op by multi-hyphenated writer extraordinaire R :)

On the other side of the pillows I printed three words from the Japanese proverb of the Three Wise Monkeys "See No Evil. Hear No Evil. Speak No Evil" and crossed them out in red.

The words are in Malay but written in Jawi which is an Arabic alphabet. 

The top is lihat = see. The middle is dengar = hear and the bottom is kata = speak. 

More handmade by my very talented friends Lynn and Luukaleather. So glad I had some company :)

Sneak peek

Here's a sneak peek at some of the stuff I've been making for Timitimitonga sale happening tomorrow, Saturday, 15th February 2014 at The Bearded Lady. That blue bag is a prototype for the Oi! Limited Edition Valentine's Bag I hope to have available tomorrow. White and black silkscreen with hand embroidered French-knots all round the heart. Also for sale will be four silk screened See No Evil pillows with hand painted details in red.There are words silk screened on the back. But you'll have to come check them out tomorrow to find out what they are.

See ya! :)

Blue Valentine

No Ryan Gosling here, but there will be limited edition Oi! post-Valentine bags for sale at The Bearded Lady cafe this Saturday, 15th February 2014. Fingers crossed :)

Mini pouches!

These mini pouches will be in the shop in the next few days. 

Hope you like them :)

TiMi stamp

The Tween went to China with my mother recently and brought home a TiMi stamp she had custom made for me. How awesome is that!

Thanks, sweetie! :)

Silk screen printing!

Pouch #27

Hand drawn with Sharpie's Stained Fabric Markers

I love using Sharpie's Stained Fabric Markers but they get blunt after a while and it becomes harder to draw fine lines. I also want to make more pouches and drawing would be really time consuming and not very practical. 

So. it is with such immense luck that The Man's friend brought over his entire silkscreen equipment to our house for storage and let us use it as much as we like. I was super excited about finally getting to experiment with silkscreen but nervous about the mess or destroying his equipment. Every time I entered the room all I could do was stare at the containers of dye, emulsion, emulsion remover, squeegee, three specially made screens and, get this, a laser printer and huge light box with 6 UV lightbulbs! All of which had hardly been used. 

Then one day I had enough of being such a chicken and announced to The Man - "Tonight's the night." And he knew I was talking about burning a screen :) 

For our first film, we used A4 paper and brushed it with oil. Apparently, that was how The Man did it in the good old days when he would stand out in the sun and count the time it took to burn a screen. He had no idea how long it would take now that we had more "professional" equipment. His friend couldn't remember either! :) To top it off we don't have a dark room and had to wait till night time to do any work which means we could hardly see what we were doing. Suffice to say, the first night was a complete disaster .

The second night was no better. Most of the tutorials I found online recommend ink-jet to print the film. Unfortunately, not one single shop here carries ink-jet transparency. So, we settled for laser print transparency, found a photocopying shop nearby that sold loose sheets and thought that since we were there we might as well photocopy our artwork onto them. Alas, we found out the hard way that as with all photocopying shops, they don't replenish their toner cartridges very often.

Finally, we used the laser printer and printed our own film but not before running into more technical problems which The Man managed to solve. By the third exhausting night of burning and washing overexposed or underexposed screens, I went to bed while The Man soldiered on to produce our first perfect screen and promptly printed our, or rather his first t-shirt. 

It has been tough but we figured out 

A) exposure time for the light box we were using = 1 min 30 seconds 

B) we have to use double layer of film per artwork to get a nice solid black that will block out light.

I wish I could say we were getting to be experts by the time we burnt my screen but we still ended up having to redo it a couple of times. 

After many days of learning, I present to you my first silk screened pouch...

Pouch #28
Silk screened and hand painted

We have yet to figure out how to silkscreen with two colours or more, so I had to hand paint the lady in red using my Pebeo Setacolor Fabric Paint.

I absolutely love silkscreen printing even if it makes me wanna tear my hair out!

More to come soon :)

Tiger

I am having loads of fun with my new stamps :)

Stamping!

I found these wooden blocks at Daiso and immediately thought of making some stamps. At first I tried carving them but that didn't work out. Then I remembered reading a post about using foam. Luckily I had a roll stashed somewhere. I laid it out and cut up a bunch of shapes using a blade and scissors and pasted them onto the blocks with white glue.

I figured I've got to get the most out of the blocks so I pasted on every side!

I got the idea to create the tree branches using only one simple shape from Making An Impression: Designing and Creating Artful Stamps by Geninne Zlatkis.

My stamps are a mess because I used a brush to paint on the poster colour instead of using stamp pads or a roller. For the girl I used a Chinese paint brush pen. It works almost as well as the Sakura Pigma Brush Pen. Unfortunately the bristles come off easily. I guess that's why it's cheaper :)

For my Dad

Made this pouch for my dad with more potato printing and doodling by the toddler.

Pouch #25

Pouch #23

Today the toddler and I did some potato printing. You can see she went bam! bam! bam! all over the fabric so I helped get some clearer Xs in for contrast.  

I looked at our potato printing and thought it would be a nice idea to turn it into a pouch. So, next I gave her another piece of fabric to doodle on using my Sharpie Stained Fabric Markers.

After that was done, I asked her to choose between a black and a red zipper. She grabbed the red one.
Great choice!

Here's the finished pouch below with print and doodle on each side.

I love the texture from the toddler's potato banging! 

And her doodling is just as pretty too.

Pouch #23

Hand printed and doodled on calico. 9' X 6"

Printing!

When my super talented friend * Lynn Wong, sent me this cool link about printing with contact paper, I immediately looked up this great video I had found a couple of months ago via this blog and decided I was going to try it once and for all. Thanks, Lynn!

So, today I grabbed the ready made screen I had bought over at Popular Bookstore, cut up (more) buildings on a piece of contact paper and stuck it on. I used Pebeo Setacolor Opaque Fabric Paint and an old ATM card for a squeegee. Since I was feeling a bit ambitious, I did a two tone print.

The contact paper was tightly rolled up when I got it, so keeping it flat was a huge task in itself. But I finally managed and printed away. 

Voila! 

I'm happy. 

Unfortunately the contact paper did not adhere long enough to the screen. And some parts printed all splotchy. Plus, if I keep using Pebeo fabric paint it will break the bank eventually but...

I am happy :)

* The Super-Talented Lynn Wong is one half of the dynamic duo behind We Make These. Check out their cuter than cute handmade crafts :) 

Pouch #18

I used the stencil from the test and my Pebeo Setacolor Opaque Fabric Paint for the buildings. Not the best colour choices with the grey fabric, though. Looks a bit washed out under brighter light but I had already prepared the pouch and I really wanted to see how stenciling would work out. My arms got tired from holding the stencil in place and from dabbing on the paint. Really tired. I should probably get a proper stippling brush.

I think you can tell I started on the left - it's a lot more smudgy :)

 Can't wait to try screen printing with contact paper next.

Testing 1,2,3

I've come across numerous stenciling projects on the world wide web and I've always wanted to try but I've been too engrossed with pouch making. My new book Print Workshop by Christine Schmidt stoked the fire so today I took out the plastic sheet I found some time back and cut up simple building shapes with a blade. I then used an old, frayed flat brush to dab on acrylic paint. 

I forgot you can't cut all around the building or the whole thing comes off and you'll be left with either a block with no windows or just squares and rectangles floating. If you noticed, I had to put a little bit of tape at the top of the first building. So, with that in mind I left some parts attached. I like that the lines break up and are not continuous and I love the rough look. However, a little less smudging would've been better.

Soon I will be testing this on some pouches. Fingers crossed! :)