Millstone Honey - Gift Bags / Screen Printing

Besides designing the labels, tags and wraps for the honey jars, I wanted to also place the 'Millstone Honey' logo onto gift bags for customers to use when purchasing honey from home. It's something extra which makes the difference. I purchased a number of bags from ebay and wanted to screen print on top of them. For the design I included the type along with the 4 emblems below it.

Here is the exposed design for the gift bags. I love screen printing and by doing these designs made me get back in the swing of things. Blenheim was used for screen printing. After foiling there for secret 7", I had adjusted to the system they use. So the process of cleaning, coating and exposing the design was pretty easy. I'm glad I've been able to use the facilities at Blenheim, because Rossington street can be slow at times because of the amount of beds. Rossington is also near the centre of town, making it more of a task as you have to walk all the way there. 

Unfortunately about every problem imaginable with screen printing happened to me. I had forgotten to flood multiple times. This made it hard for me to get a clean print as it had bled and I needed to use lots of newspaper print to soak up the ink. I also should of put more parcel tape closer around the design, mainly because I had to spread ink a long way. A lot of ink was getting wasted and becoming uneven as I was pulling over a bigger space than needed. The screen I was using was way, way too big. I was doing a very small design and I was printing with an A2 screen.

After a couple tests on the bags, the logo wasn't fully printing because of the bumps in the bag that the handles made. I asked a technician for help and he gave me a folded mat which helped create a stronger, flatter, more even base for me to print on. The screen printing bed I used was one on a table and not on a big printing press, which was new to me. I found it hard managing it. There were alot of things to remember to do. Flooding the screen, lifting up the screen, placing a new bag in the correct place, pulling the screen back down and then pulling the ink over. I got the hang of it after a while and managed to do a few decent prints.