Weddingbee Blog

I’ve had a behemoth Yudu screen printing machine taking up precious space in my closet for two years. I’d dream up projects for it, chicken out, and change my mind here and there about using it. (I particularly wanted to use it with Robin’s invitations, but with any gadget, there’s a learning period to using it, and I didn’t want to tackle someone else’s project learning on the machine.)

This year for Christmas I decided to bite the bullet. Back in October I ordered 150 flour sack towels from the American Chair Store with high hopes and intentions to put together a small package for our Christmas cards. In December it was a mad dash and a few long nights of ironing and screen printing, but I’m happy to report that my first foray into Yudu screen printing was a success, and I would love to print some invitations on fabric in the future…a good excuse to throw a party!

I had to wash and iron all of the towels first to get rid of lint and give myself a nice flat surface to print on.

OMG ANNOYING IRONING OVER 100 TOWELS. YAWN BORING LAME TAKES FOREVERRRRR.

Then, the fun begins.

I pulled the machine out and watched the DVD that accompanied it to get an idea of how to use it. The DVD is obnoxious and features a girl and a guy fighting the whole time, which I didn’t mind so much except that some of the key elements (like which side of the screen to apply the emulsion on, and tips like making sure the emulsion is 100 percent dry as a bone and it might take an hour—not just 20 minutes—to dry if you live somewhere cold and humid) were lacking. Videos on YouTube were available but I figured that the video that was delivered with the machine would be best. Wrong.

After 3 wasted screens (OMG that’s $30 worth of screens) I finally figured out the magic that is making the emulsion. Once you make it in the machine, you flood the screen with water, let it sit for 1 or 2 minutes, then gently rub away the printable parts of the screen.

If you let it sit for long enough the printable parts start coming up on their own. Don’t force it—be patient. Enough water and time will have it coming up easily. Don’t rub hard; you’ll lift up parts of the emulsion that are supposed to stay on the screen and ruin your screen (3 times, if you’re an impatient heathen like I am).

There we go. Decent. You can see right under the “d” in “Blessed” there is some emulsion that was supposed to stay that was coming up. I just cut a piece of tape to match that shape and affixed it to the OPPOSITE side of the screen to take care of that…otherwise there would have been some bleeding around the area.

I did most of the printing while my husband was out of the house (the mess and amount of space it took to dry the towels was driving him crazy…neat freak!) so I couldn’t get any pics of me in action printing.

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I will say that it took a LOT OF INK to print 90 towels (I ran out of patience and time by towel 90 and only ended up sending those out). Being used to the amount of ink the Gocco uses (minimal) I originally bought a 3 pack of primary colors which featured a 3 ounce bottle of red ink, which lasted me about 15-20 towels. Bummer. I ordered a 12 oz bottle of red alone from Amazon after that, and that was more than enough to get me through 90 (I used about half the bottle).

There was definitely a learning curve as to how hard to swipe the squeegee in order to get a perfect print, but by towel 60 or so I was swiping masterfully and the prints were coming out great every time. I’d say I messed up about 10-15 towels, so if you’re tackling a project like this, make sure you have plenty of spare ink and printing material, as not everything comes out perfectly!

I wrapped the towels around our Christmas Cards from Minted with some baker’s twine and shipped them off.

All in all, I really love the Yudu. It gives you a HUGE printable area in comparison to the Gocco (Yudu’s area is 11″x14″ whereas my Gocco B5 prints a 4″ by 6″ area) and supplies are easy to come by (sold in major craft stores). Supplies are comparably expensive to the Gocco but you can use coupons (Michaels always has a 40 percent off coupon floating out there on the internet) for Yudu supplies (but not the Yudu machine itself). The prints that I didn’t screw up came out crisp and bright.

For this project I used the 110 mesh screen for fabric, but a 220 mesh (finer) screen is available for paper printing, which is what I’ll probably try to tackle next. I can’t wait to dream up my next project!