Screen Printing for Dummies

* This post has been sitting in draft for almost a year.  I thought I should post it.


HA has always had this idea of making tshirts.  After our project earlier this year of making the picture for Gravity, we thought they would make a great tshirt.


DM, in his thoughtfulness, brought back HA a t-shirt making kit on one of his trips back to the US.


So the boys set aside a weekend to make tshirts.  The first step was to find the tshirts.  It's hard to find good quality, inexpensive tshirts in Australia but the boys found them.  The next step was to decide on what went on the tshirt.  HA had one particular quote he wanted on it so that was the first tshirt.  Then we have a friend that was leaving Canberra to move to Brisbane, so they decided to make a tshirt for him.


I had no idea screen printing was such a time consuming job.

The ingredients

The saying is printed onto a wire screen

The screen is placed on top of the tshirt and the paint is run over it.  This part was a three person job.

The final product.  We had to redo DM's b/c the paint was too thin. But we thought it would be funny to switch out the tshirts late into the night so that people wouldn't be sure if the shirt was fuzzy or if their vision was fuzzy.

The final product that the boys wore out in Sydney!

The Red Center

I've always had a bucket list of things I'd like to do before I leave Australia.  One of those things is visiting Uluru or better known as "The Rock".  My friend DM is also moving back to the US in May and he also had this trip on his bucket list...so, we decided to do a quick weekend.  Everyone I know that's visited Uluru have said that you don't need more than two days there - so we decided to do the trip in a long weekend.

We got to Uluru at around noon on Saturday and drove directly to the resort.  There is only one resort in Uluru so there aren't alot of choices.  It is literally in the middle of nowhere.

There wasn't much to do at the resort so we headed out to the rock.  When it came right down to it, we were not prepared.  None of us had sunscreen. I was wearing flip flops.  And we had no water.  Completely unprepared.

It was worth it though.  The Rock is beautiful and much bigger than you'd expect.  But, I'd like to confirm, you really don't need more than a day in Uluru.  We went out to the Helga's and hiked around a bit.  Then we drove to The Rock and hiked just a little bit and drove around the entire thing in about an hour.  We choose not to climb to the top b/c it's not respectful to the natives.

The Helga's - There was way more vegetation than I expected.

Hiking the Helga's

What I imagine Mars to look like

Always alot of love between HA and DM

What the boys did while I took pictures

Sunset

We ended up having dinner at the resort and having a few beers but there wasn't much else to do so we were in bed fairly early.  The next day, we decided we didn't need to see the rock at sun rise so we started our road trip to Alice Springs.  It was quite a long drive.

Came across this tire tree on the way to Alice Springs

We failed to realize that we weren't getting to Alice Springs until late afternoon on a Sunday.  This meant that nothing was open.  So, we made the best of it and found a pub and drank beer all afternoon and then had dinner at a pub.  I don't really have anything to post about Alice.  I wouldn't suggest visiting.