Tshirts 2.0: Stencil Edition

Hey all! Hope you've been enjoying the break in the weather as much as I have. Here's what we've been up to in the Commons this week:

Events on the Horizon:

• On Tuesday, Sept 15th from 5-7pm, Reviving Our American Democracy is hosting a forum on our local recycling system. Jeff Auch will be talking about programs within the City of Montague, Sarah Cooper will be talking about what's going on at the Muskegon County level, and I'll be talking about all the different material-specific programs Montague Commoners runs, and our plans for expansion next year.
• On Friday, Sept 25th from 5-8pm, join us at the Montague Artisan Market for our first Firewood Friday of the year! This is an all-ages potluck social where we split kindling for next year's sugarbush.
• On Saturday, Sept 26th from 2-4pm, the White Lake Climate Action Council is hosting their fall Electronics Recycling Event! You can find a list of items they accept here. Montague Commoners will be there as well, collecting computers and networking equipment for our Computers for the Commons program. It's a great opportunity to free up some space in your house and make sure that the minerals in your electronics don't go to waste.

Still time to get your shirts printed!

We got nearly all the remaining tshirts printed on Saturday, but we've still got a dozen or so to print this week. So if you've got a blank tshirt, tote bag, or other flat fabric object that you want the Montague Commoners logo on, bring it down to the Market this Saturday before noon.

Meanwhile: Stencils!

Screenprinting is a great way to print the same thing dozens of times, but the same thing dozens of times can get boring eventually. That's where freezer paper stencils come in. Longtime newsletter readers may remember this technique from the "We're on the same side" banner I made last year. That was a single print of a very big design, but you can use the same technique to put a much smaller design on several tshirts.

The first step is to draw or print your design onto a normal piece of paper. (I printed a whole batch of templates at once and forgot to turn off double-sided printing, which will come back to bite me in a few steps.)

Next, tape your template to a hard, flat, transparent surface with a light source behind it. I do enough of these that I've got a dedicated lightpad, but you can also use a sunny window, or the glass out of a picture frame and a lamp. Once your template is secure, tape a piece of freezer paper over it, coated side down. (Freezer paper is basically parchment paper with a thin plastic coating on it. It's most often used for storing cuts of meat in the freezer. You can find it at most grocery stores near the wax paper and aluminum foil.)

Forgetting to turn off double-sided printing definitely raises the difficulty of this next step, but luckily this was a simple enough design that I could get away with not re-printing. And those of you who can read upside down and backwards get a preview of one of the next designs I'll be doing 😂

Next, trace your design onto your freezer paper. You can use pencil or pen, but thin lines are going to be more helpful than thick ones when you're cutting it out

Before you fully disassemble your tracing setup, make sure that you've gotten all of the details of the design transferred. It can be surprisingly easy to forget the middle of an A or think you've traced an area where you haven't.

Next comes one of the most finicky and time-consuming bits: cutting out the stencil. I like to use a retractable X-acto knife for this, but you can also use a box cutter, utility knife, or other sharp object of your choice. I timed myself as I was cutting out this stencil, and it took about 45 minutes.

One of my favorite parts about this technique is that if you're careful, you can get two stencils for the work of one. You can use the letters you cut out as their own stencil to get cool effects using negative space.

Next, it's time to iron the stencil to the tshirt. Every iron is a little different, but I like to use a high heat and a press cloth. The goal is to melt the plastic coating on the freezer paper so that it sticks to the tshirt, but not to singe the paper or cause it to crinkle up. If it's your first time trying this, I would recommend testing different iron settings and press cloths with some freezer paper scraps before you try it with your painstakingly-cut stencil.

Here are both the positive and the negative stencil after they've been ironed onto their respective tshirts.

Here's the time-consuming but fun part: painting over the stencils. One of the big advantages that stenciling has over screenprinting is that you can really get creative with the colors. Using multiple colors in a screenprinting design takes fancy equipment and careful calibration, but using multiple colors in a stenciling design just requires multiple colors of paint. You can do things like blended gradients that would be nearly impossible to pull off with traditional screenprinting equipment.

Once the paint is dry, you can peel off the freezer paper and see the result! I'm thrilled with how the gray v-neck turned out, to the point that I'm tempted to snag it for my own personal wardrobe. The purple tank top didn't come out quite as readable as I would have liked, but I'll be able to apply that lesson to future shirts, and maybe someone out there wants to make a subtler statement than I do 😄

And because I was careful when I peeled up the stencils, I was able to iron them onto a second set of shirts! If I'm lucky, I'll be able to get 3-5 prints out of each stencil before it tears or stops sticking. It means that these stenciled shirts are extremely limited editions, but if a particular stencil design turns out to be popular we can always invest in a screenprinted version.

This Week In Nature

Between the falling temps and the high humidity, we're seeing a lot of late summer/early fall mushrooms come out to play! This was a medium-sized Chicken of the Woods that Nate and I found this week. I'd also expect to see honey mushrooms ("stumpers") start showing up soon. Obviously, use LOTS of caution when foraging for unfamiliar mushrooms, there are lots of nasty surprises out there this time of year as well. But if you think you might have found something tasty, feel free to bring it over to the Market, and either we or our friends at Great Lakes Mushroom Company can help you make a positive ID.

Speaking of potential foraging dangers, it is also nightshade season right now! This particular plant popped up under one of the trees at the Artisan Market. If you want a personal introduction so you know what to avoid in the future, stop by the Market on Saturday and I can show you what to look for.

Recommendation Corner

My recommendation for this week is the Connections documentary series by James Burke. It was originally produced in 1978, but it remains one of the best tech documentaries I've ever seen. Instead of sticking to the usual "great inventor" or "linear progress" narratives, Burke takes an almost ecological approach, showing how social, historical, and political factors influence the way technology develops, and how ideas and techniques from seemingly unconnected fields can influence each other and deepen our understandings of the world.

I first ran across this series in high school, and I've returned to it many times over the years. It's become something of a cult classic in open tech circles. The haircuts and the references to "modern computers" might be increasingly outdated, but the underlying way of thinking about technology is absolutely timeless.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! This is another new polish from last month's Polish Pickup haul, and another one that's a little tricky to photograph well. It's got at least half a dozen different sparkly pigments in there, and I could swear at least one of them is retroreflective! So you'll just have to come check it out in person if you want to see its full glory.

Enjoy the early fall while it lasts, and don't forget to bring your tshirts down to the Market on Saturday! This will (hopefully) be the last weekend that we're doing screenprinting for a while. If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.

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