On a non-programming note, I’ve been playing a lot of Baba is You lately. It’s definitely the best puzzle game I’ve played in a while.

A few of my friends felt the same way so we got together and decided to make some shirts. The characters are just so cute that we couldn’t resist.

The process is pretty straightforward, it just involves a lot of waiting between printing passes for the paint to dry.

1. Prep the screen and your work area. You want to draw the screens so they are taut. Inconsistent tension may lead to ink pooling and an uneven surface after printing

2. Draw the positive of the intended pattern with water soluble drawing fluid

3. Screen print the negative of the pattern over the screen. Make sure to elevate the screen, or the filler will attach to the surface you’re printing on instead of filling the holes in the screen.

4. When the filler has dried, run water over the screen until the drawing fluid washes out. Use a paint brush or a blunt knife to scrape out any filler that got stuck where you don’t want it to be.

5. Squeegee the paint through the screen. You may need to block out each of the things

I was mostly happy with the result. As with most of the screen printing I do, there are always minor variations in the shirts. That’s part of the charm of doing these things by hand.

This was the first time I did a multi-colour print before, and the first time I mixed colours. Before this, I had only printed plain white and plain black shirts. For a first pass, I’m pretty happy with it. The catches I know now for next time are

• Putting the same pattern on one screen works fine, but I burned through a lot of paper towels to block the screen elements out on the different passes.

• The mixed colours dry a lot darker than the original colours. I think it’s because we’re printing on black and the ink is somewhat transparent. In the past, they’ve faded after the first few washes, so I expect them to get even more subtle.

Now I know.

I enjoy working on crafts now and again. Maybe I’ll start adding them to my blog here instead of only writing about weird edge-cases I run into in build systems & setting up linux.

If I do end up segmenting my blog like that I’ll probably end up using hakyll’s attribute tag system.