SpeedballSpeed Screens for T-Shirt Printmaking

We bought these to produce t-shirts for a school group without having to mess with manually applied emulsion. It took a little experimentation, but we were pleased with the results, and I think it was easier and cleaner in the end than messing with emulsion with the students.What we learned is that the pre-coated screens are more delicate that with manually applied emulsion, both before and after transferring the design, so they need to be handled more carefully than you might expect. Also, not surprisingly, they don't take as well if your design has thin lines or fine detail. We ended up adjusting our design slightly to work with the screens, but were pleased with the results.

These are much easier to use at home than spreading emulsion by hand and trying to find somewhere dark to let it dry, but they are MUCH more delicate than screens I've made in a proper studio. I was able to burn some images with a decent amount of fine detail successfully, but after pulling a couple dozen prints the emulsion was falling off in some areas. Great if you're only doing a small run of something, but not if you wanted to make tons of prints.

I had high hopes for these, especially because of the Speedball brand reputation. Unfortunately, I wasted all 3 sheets trying to get them to work. I think the emulsion might just be too soft to create detailed screens. I've burned many screens before , and watched the video for this product several times , taking care to follow all the steps carefully. 1. The print and plastic overlay stuck to the emulsion sheet every time and I had to tear it off. 2. When washing away the emulsion, it basically washed all the detail away. I foolishly bought these for a very important project and have no time to get another product before then. If the problems described are due to mistakes I made, I'm all ears. Bummed I basically threw money away.

I couldn't manage to get the curing times right. I did the first amount of time they asked for and the image washed out, I exposed for longer but nothing washed out, and exposed for shorter and the image did come out but the emulsion was still stuck on pretty tightly. They don't really give you enough sheets for you to afford messing up.

I am a stickler to instructions and not one of these worked. They just fell apart . Kind of disappointed. Not sure if they were defective to began with.