Sarah: Obi Wan For Century

Dave asked me to create packaging for the magazines that different members of our magazine staff have worked on. I thought it would be cool to have obi-inspired "belts" around the stacks of magazines.

Having recently fallen in love with Duck Cloth, I decided that this fabric would be perfect for the project: it is heavy duty, doesn't fray a lot, holds its shape well, and my local fabric store carries a variety of colors. I chose a bright red and a sage-y green. Joann's also had some skinny ribbon on sale, so I picked up a few spools (3 spools for $.99!) in the same colors.

Since I've been wanting to try out some home screen-printing, I thought this would be a great project to try out, since it'd make the packaging a little more interesting. I grabbed an image of a bonsai tree from a Google image search, and went to town using this tutorial. I didn't take any pictures of the process, just of the finished product.
Some notes on screenprinting using this tutorial:
- The Mod Podge takes many hours to dry. Dave and I both needed to wait almost 24 hours for the Mod Podge to dry before we could begin printing.
- Mod Podge is water soluble, so rinsing your screen after you screenprint (in case you wanted to save your screen for later) is not an option. Using paint or something else that would block out the screen but not wash off could be a better solution. I decided that the destruction of my screen would encourage me to make another pattern.
- It seems like more abstract patterns (like my bonsai that didn't need to be exact) did better than more precise patterns (like the words that Dave attempted to print). One could try a finer screen than $1 super-generic brand nylons.
- Do not, under any circumstances, use red Sharpie to outline your pattern on the screen. Dave and I used white screenprinting ink, and his red marker bled, making his phrase pink. No good.

I put contrasting ribbons around each obi, and offset the screenprint because... I thought it looked better that way. People were nice and acted like they liked them.

So that's the two different colors (again, the colors are prettier in real life, I keep taking pictures at night in my semi-dark apartment), a closeup on the screenprint, and then the back. At Lisa's brilliant suggestion I opted out of sewing the back shut, and instead just pressed all of the edges (yes, this was a sew-free project), and then used double-sided tape to close up the back. The effect was nice, and the construction was pretty easy.