PearPrint hand printed fabrics are designed and screen printed in West Wales, UK.
Thank you for your interest in my work! Here’s a bit about myself.
I live in a village in rural west Wales, quite near the coast. I hear no traffic noises from my garden workshop (well maybe the odd tractor). The wind and the rain can be a little noisy at times but mostly I hear birds and the sheep calling to their lambs in the next door field.
In my garden I’ll spot hedgehogs shuffling around and snuffling at dusk, hear the frogs splash back in to the pond at the sound of my approaching footsteps, and watch bees busily gathering pollen from the flowers.
These are simple pleasures and combined with my love of screen printing have resulted in this collection of hand-printed baby and children’s clothing, and fabric bags. I hope it inspires children and adults alike to marvel at the natural world immediately around us and to cherish it.
My aim is to produce fun, practical and comfortable things that you can enjoy using in your everyday life. I hope my customers can enjoy using the pieces that I produce as much as I have done working with the materials. The garments and fabrics I print on are all ethically produced, mostly organic and printed with environmentally friendly inks with excellent washability.
And if you’d still like to know more, read on for more on my creative process. Or contact me with your query.
Screen printing with paper cut stencils
I use a really ‘low-tech’ method of printing involving a hand held silk screen, rubber squeegee and stencils made from paper. There are many limitations to this process which is why it is not commercially used, but I enjoy the immediacy that needing little equipment allows and never tire of the clean lines that the paper can produce. I also enjoy the challenge of working around the constraints.
I develop a design and separate it out into two, three or sometimes four carefully chosen colours. As with any screen printing a different stencil is required for each colour printed, which I cut with a fine, sharp stencil knife from a medium weight paper. I then place a screen stretched with a fine fabric mesh (originally silk but these days usually polyester) on top of the paper. Ink especially formulated for screen printing is spread on to the mesh and pressed through with a rubber squeegee. The paper stencil adheres to and is supported by the mesh screen and the ink is forced through all the holes that have been cut into the paper. Many prints can then be made.
Subsequent stencils in different colours are then keyed on to the first colour to build up the whole design. This can be tricky, it is a rather inexact process, but I have always found this to add to the hand printed nature of the item (unless it is too ‘off’ and then it gets sold as a second!) Every finished print will have slight variations.
The fabrics
Screen printing and designing are what I love to do but what I print on to is very carefully considered. Cotton is a beautiful natural fibre and we rely on the poorer parts of the world to produce it for us. It is important to me to support and promote ethically made fabric and garments. Organically grown cotton as well as being less toxic for people to work with has the added bonus of being kinder to the environment. The fabrics that I choose feel lovely to handle and work with and absorb the ink well to support a crisp print.
Thank you for your interest and I’d be delighted to answer any queries you might have about my products or processes, just message me!
PearPrint 