Catching up: CAMP!

This is the last in a series of three long overdue posts to catch up on, then I can start posting about more contemporary happenings (Hallowe'en amongst them). Without further adieu, here's the scoop on art camp 2014!

        Art Camp, again, right on schedule just a few days after Martha, Smokie and I moved house (this time, thank the gods, to a much better house). The studio opens onto a small deck, where we set up tables and we were fortunate to do all of our screen printing  en plain air, as Van Gogh and the Fauves intended.

        Every year, as the returning campers get older, the projects mature with them. Our focus this year was screen printing; mainly tee shirts, along with a few bags and tapestries.

        We spent the first day planning, sketching, illustrating and working out ideas and getting them transferred onto tracing paper so I could burn the screens overnight. 

Fandom was in no short supply, ranging from Disney to Star Wars, Hunger Games to Divergent (though that is a shorter road all together), and plenty of Dr Who.  

Once the designs were ready. We laid them out on the screens to see if we could get by on my supply of three large screens. 

After a display of my well-honed Tetris skills, it worked! What I didn't know was that I was missing two designs, and we only had time to burn once. More on that later. 

Martha very much appreciated the below design, ha. 

And I, in turn, geeked out over this one. 

One of the boys made a really cool three-color World Cup shirt - the camp took place at the height of 'futbol' fever. 

Nerdiest shirt award goes to the amazing and wonderfully quirky NETFLIX handmade fan shirt. So great! 

I had no ideas how grateful I would be for the unforeseen blessing of mild weather, the outside printing set up, and (more importantly) the wash out station under a tree. I can't imagine printing this volume over such long hours and traipsing throughf the house and leaning over the bathtub, as I do when it's just me printing. 

I absolutely loved these MineCraft inspired shirts. 

The solution for the lost designs (those that didn't get prepared for screen printing) was for me to carve linoleum for block printing, which I lucking had fabric ink for. Everyone left happy (whew). 

Martha answered the pleas of the girls (and boys) and taught them each how to make a zipper clutch or small tote. They had a lot of fun working on a sewing project more substantial than what I can teach them.

That's it! That's all! Scram! Until, you know, later.