Make a Screen Printing Screen With an Avacado and a Laser!

Screenprint with an AVOCADO? I asked myself. It was so crazy it just might work.....

I've messed around with screen printing a tiny little bit over the years, using cut vinyl to make the screen printing stencils, but that's really time consuming, finicky, and is only good for a single use. Traditional screen printing uses chemicals to make and clean the screens, so I never went there. I recently got a laser cutter, and read that you could use acrylic paint to coat screens and then laser out the design. Sounds good, but who knows about the fumes you are making when laser cutting the paint, and you can't get that paint out of the screen to reuse the screen for a different design. If only there was a better way......

Enter the humble avocado.

After numerous interactions with the dishes in our dishwasher, I began to realize one thing- avocado has a superpower. It's the ability to stay stuck onto dishes even when all the dishes around come out sparkling clean! I wondered if this awkward green fruit could be an unconventional solution that would allow me to make reusable screen printing screens without the need for chemicals!

1. Half an avocado
2. Laser cutter
3. 120 mesh stainless steel screen
4. Wood to make frame (or solid wood frame with no paint/varnish etc)
5. Screws (if making frame)
6. Staple gun
7. Gloves (to protect hands while working with mesh)
8. Paintbrush
9. Oven to cook the screen
10. Screen printing ink
11. Squeegee
12. Masking tape

The good thing about this technique is that you can make fairly complex images. Just make sure the image is a black and white image (no grayscale).

I made mine from my favourite mug. It's a fruit mug. Enough said.

Make sure you mirror the image before laser cutting!

As this whole process relies on using a laser, you are going to need one of those. I used a Creality Falcon2 Pro with a 22 watt laser module, but there are a multitude of lasers out there that should work great. The one thing I would say though, is to make sure it has some kind of enclosure. It is really really bad to get the laser beam in your eye, like, causing permanent blindness kind of bad, so don't skimp on this feature. Since we will be cutting on stainless steel mesh and steel is reflective, there is even more chance of the laser reflecting and getting somewhere it shouldn't. Wear approved laser eyewear as well.

Normal screen printing uses a fabric screen, pulled tight over a frame. Because a laser would make short work of a bit of thin fabric, I use a stainless steel screen. The one I used was 120 mesh but you could also experiment with different mesh sizes as well. The higher the number, the finer the mesh.

I found my mesh at a popular online shopping platform with a quick search. I am not sure exactly what most people use this mesh for, but it looks like perhaps vents and drain covers are common uses.

Once you have your mesh, you will know the size of frame you can make. The mesh needs to overlap the inside edge of the frame enough that you can staple the mesh to the frame. I made my frame from a 1 x 4 that I cut into 1 1/2 inch wide strips.

Originally I thought I could just use an old picture frame, however I will be putting the frame in a hot oven, and I don't want any paint/varnish/glue to either start on fire or give off fumes that would contaminate my oven. I do think you might be able to use the frame from a painting canvas as long as it is just made from wood and fasteners.

Screw the frame together, keeping everything as flat as possible.

Put on some gloves to protect your hands.

Use some old scissors to cut a rectangle of screen to fit your frame.

Lay the screen on the frame and attach one side by stapling it to the wood.

Go to the opposite side and pull the screen as tight as you can while stapling it down.

Repeat for the remaining two sides.

Apply masking tape along the cut edges of the screen. This serves two purposes: To protect your hands from the sharp screen edges, and to keep the edges from bending up and possibly interfering with the laser as it moves.

Grab a glass or jar.

Cut a square of your stainless steel mesh that is a bit larger than the top of the glass.

Cut an avocado in half and mush it up a little in a bowl.

Place the square of mesh over the top of the glass and hold it there tightly with one hand.

Scoop a spoonful of avocado onto the mesh and start to rub it into and through the mesh with the back side of the spoon.

Repeat until you have mushed the half-avocado through the screen.

Scrape any avocado off the bottom of the screen into the glass.

This should give you a nice dollop of extremely smooth avocado paste.

Now it is time to apply the avocado to the screen. The goal here is to end up with a thin layer of avocado that fills all the little holes in the screen and is also a consistent thickness. It is really beneficial for this to have a good quality paintbrush that is a decent width. I used one that was about 1" wide.

Paint the avocado paste onto the mesh, not worrying about filling every void, just getting the paste onto the mesh.

Flip the frame over and you will see the paste protruding from the back side. Use your paintbrush to spread this extra paste around the screen, trying to get it even-ish.

Flip the screen again and spread again.

Repeat this process until the avocado that is pushing through to the other side is relatively even.

At this point there is too much paste on the screen, so now you want to run your paintbrush across the screen again, but this time after each stroke, wipe the excess paste you gathered off the paintbrush and back into the glass.

Flip and repeat until the avocado seeping through is minimal and even.

Set aside the screen to dry overnight.

It is also a good idea to prepare a small test screen in the same way. You can use it to calibrate your laser to get the best speed/power combination.

Now it's time to laser your screen. This is the fun part!

A lot of this will be different depending on what laser and software you are using, but the basic concept should be similar.

Using your test screen, set up your laser to make a test swatch. I am using Lightburn as my laser cutting software so I go to Laser tools>Material Test and set up the material test generator to make one row of 10 squares at the highest laser speed (18000 mm/m) at power levels from 10% to 100%

After cutting, look at the squares and see which one the laser has done a complete job of cutting. For me it was 70% power, so, just in case there were some thicker sections on my screen, I decided to go a little higher and use 80% power for my actual screen.

If your test has gone well, this is the easy part.

Put the screen in the laser cutter, line up where you want the image to be, and press start.

It took about 15 minutes to cut my screen.

When it's done you should have an amazing image!

Remember that you need to cut the mirror image of what you want to print because you will be flipping the screen and printing from the other side.

Pre heat an oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Remove the masking tape from the frame.

Put the screen in the oven and cook for 10 minutes.

Watch it closely to make sure it doesn't start on fire or some other catastrophic thing.

Pull the screen out of the oven after 10 minutes, and turn off your smoke alarms which are likely beeping angrily at you.

** The time and temerature may possibly be decreased and still achieve the same result, I just guessed at that time/temp combo and haven't had a chance to test any others. Less smoke would definitely be better:)

Replace the tape around the screen that you removed before cooking.

Flip the screen over and apply tape around the edge where the screen meets the frame. This part is a little tricky, because, apparently there is no tape that will stick to burnt avocado! What I did was use wide masking tape, and stick half of it to the vertical side of the frame, creasing it into the corner with my fingernail. This leaves the other half of the tape strip resting on the mesh. The main reason for this tape is just so that no paint can get between the mesh and the frame and out onto your shirt where you don't want it.

Figure out where to place the screen on the shirt.

Apply screen printing paint to the screen and squeegee it on.

As I have very little knowledge in the art of screen printing, I won't give much advice on how to actually make the print, but what I did was one light pass with the squeegee to spread the paint over the design and then another pass, pressing firmly to push the paint through the screen onto the shirt. I repeated that a second time, and then carefully lifted the screen off the shirt.

I started with white paint and made two prints with that.

After that first printing, I was excited with how well the prints came out, but the real test would be whether I could wash the screen and have it survive well enough to make another print from it.

I sprayed the paint from the screen with a spray nozzle in my kitchen sink, held the screen up to the light and was quite happy with what I saw. There were just a few tiny pinholes in the screen but other than that, the avocado held up perfectly!

I went and made 3 more prints with black paint, and they worked perfectly.

I washed the screen again, and it still looked great! There were possibly a few more tiny pinholes, but not enough to be a problem yet. I am not sure how many washings and re-use are possible but I am going to guess you could likely get 5 or 6.

That's a win!

The final test in my experiment was to see if I could completely clean the screen and reuse it, so I decided to try wash all the avocado out.

Just spraying and scrubbing with a brush did nothing to dislodge the cooked avocado, so I weighted the screen down in the sink with a bucket, added some detergent from our dishwasher, and left it for a couple of hours.

When I came back, I used the spray nozzle again, and it was able to start to blast away some of the avocado, and after 10 minutes or so of scrubbing and spraying, I had the screen totally cleaned out.

I re-applied some new avocado paste, chose a new design and laser cut it to test whether the screen would still work for a second design. I am happy to say the print was a success!!

I followed the instructions for the screen printing ink I was using to permanently set the ink so that it wouldn't wash out.

For my ink, that was ironing each side 3-5 minutes at medium heat.

1. While I was cutting the LostWax logo, I realized that I had forgotten to make it a mirror image. I quickly stopped the laser, flipped the design and re-cut a little higher on the screen. The handy thing about using the avocado paste is that I was then able to paint some of it over the accidentally cut portion before cooking the screen, thereby sealing up that section so I could still use the screen to make my print.
2. You might not need to totally clean the screen in order to make a different design. Since the laser is etching away the avocado anyways, all you really need to do is fill any open areas on the screen with paste, and then cook it again. You would want to make sure you didn't get too much avocado built up on the screen though so the laser would still do a complete job of clearing the mesh.
3. When making the frame, try not to use wood with knots. I found that after a few minutes in my oven, the sap in the knots started to liquefy and drip into my oven.

I guess that's it. I am super excited about the possibilities offered here for screen printing at home, especially for limited number, original designs. I am even more excited that I was able to utilize the stuck-on-ability of avocado and use it for good instead of evil.

I'd love to hear if you try this technique and if you find ways to make it even better!!

When life gives you avocados, make.... a t-shirt.

Thanks for hanging out with me!

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