First attempts at screen printing

I am having so much fun learning new things at the moment! I'm taking a 'screen printed textiles' course this term - screen printing was also on my wish list of things to learn this year. In fact it is something I have wanted to try for a long time, but have never had the chance really until now. What I would love to do eventually is design and screen print my own fabric so I can use it to make things.

I'm now a few weeks into the course and it is getting more exciting as I have just made my first screen. Before that we were spending quite a lot of the time on design, and I was a bit overwhelmed as I had so many ideas of things that I wanted to do that I had problems narrowing down my ideas.

But, as you can see, my image is an elephant, which will be overlaid with a paisley pattern in a second (and maybe third) colour. I will need to print the shapes out first, and then clean the screen and make a second screen with the overlay patterns on it. I'm probably being far too ambitious for a first effort - so we shall see how it all turns out.

I'm working with a lovely group of people. There are just six people on the course, so the group is small and we get lots of attention from our tutor. We are all from very different art/craft/design backgrounds and working on quite different ideas for our finished product, so we are all learning from each other as well.

I will hopefully be printing this coming week - I'm so excited!