Save-the-dates!

My brother-in-law designed my fabulous save-the-date design for our vintage hankies! Check it out!

I'm not going to lie, this has not been an easy and stress-free project! My sister and I started on Sunday to try to print the design on the hankies. I bought a yudu screen printer to use, but we were both new to the contraption so it definitely took some learning! It started out with a trip to Kinko's to print the design on to the yudu transparency, the first step in the process! Come to find out, Kinko's is not allowed to print on ink-jet transparencies, so back to the house to try it on the home printer! It actually worked out really well so the first step was complete and successful!

Then to the tricky part...creating the screen. I won't even tell you about all the steps we went through, but at the very end of it we figured out we didn't "expose" the screen long enough. That is a nerdy yudu term that you probably wouldn't understand unless you have read the manual a million times like I did! Anyway, the screen we created basically melted away and we had to start all over! The second time it actually worked and we were ready to start printing! Of course we started on a couple of sample hankies because I didn't want to mess up any of the ones I really loved. The first one seemed to work out perfectly! On to the next two...not so perfect. The first one that turned out so well was a thicker fabric and the ink did fine on it, but the other 2 were extremely thin (as you can imagine most vintage hankies would be) so the ink on the silhouettes started bleeding. Enter MELTDOWN. Ok, I didn't have a total meltdown, but after 6 hours of working on this I was tired and frustrated and I didn't know what to do!

We called it quits for the day as I contemplated ways to avoid this little ink-bleeding problem. Over the last couple of days I have tried other things trying to make the ink not run and nothing was working. I read on someone's blog that they had better luck with the metallic paints because they are thicker than the flat paints. So I went to Michael's today and bought some metallic ink and decided to give it a whirl. And whah lah! Look below to see some examples of my successful hankies. The ink is VERY thick and does not run at all so I think we may have a winner people!

The pictures didn't turn out perfectly because I took them on a glass table and the reflection of the silver in the ink makes it look a little grayish in the picture. Anyway, they look cuter in person!

I only have 6 done so far, but I'm going to try and get a lot done this weekend! That's another thing about the yudu. Its a slow printing process because you have to wash the screen off after about 5 hankies because the ink will dry on the screen! What a pain! It will be worth it in the end though!