Issue 07 · Studio Visit
A look at repeat printing, pigment pastes and small-run fabric work.
Published 14 March · Glenwood, Durban · Words and process notes by the editorial desk
Glenwood in March is heavy. The garage behind the house has been converted into a darkroom and wash bay, and by ten in the morning the emulsion on the screens is already tacky if you leave them out. Printing here is a negotiation with humidity as much as with the artwork. The studio runs water-based pigment pastes on cotton and linen, mostly tea towels, yardage for interior clients, and short apparel batches that rarely go past sixty pieces.
Registration happens on a long trestle table, not a carousel. The printer tapes a printed acetate to the table, lines up the first screen, and marks the corners with masking tape so the next colour lands in the same place. On a two-colour repeat this is slow but predictable. On a four-colour tea towel it becomes the whole afternoon. The table is marked in permanent ink at intervals so yardage can be advanced by hand without measuring every time.
Colour consistency between print days is the part most people underestimate. Pigment paste mixed on a Tuesday will not match the same recipe mixed on a Friday if the studio is warmer and the paste dries faster in the screen. The studio keeps a physical swatch archive on a ring binder: every mix is printed onto the same cotton, dated, and noted with the paste ratio. Digital colour is treated as a starting point only, because a screen on a monitor tells you nothing about how pigment sits on a linen weave.
Misprints are part of the budget. A screen that clogs halfway through a run of forty towels means either washing out and restarting the colour, or pulling the whole run and reprinting. The studio counts on roughly one spoiled piece in every twelve on a new design, less once the screen has been broken in. Screens themselves are exposed in the converted garage with a halogen lamp and a timer, and a reclaimed screen gets re-stretched rather than replaced when the mesh gives out.
Interior designers make up a steady share of the work, usually asking for a specific width of yardage in a colour pulled from a fabric sample. That is where the swatch archive earns its keep. The studio matches by eye under daylight, prints a metre, and waits for approval before committing to the full run.
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About the writer
Textile and print contributor, based in Durban
Thandiwe has spent the last nine years reporting on how fabric actually gets printed in KwaZulu-Natal, from small Glenwood garages to larger runs out in Pinetown. She trained in surface design at DUT before moving into writing, which is why her interviews tend to drift toward squeegee angles, mesh counts and the mess left after a bad registration day.
For this piece she spent four print days with the studio, watching how they line up a three-colour repeat on a ten-metre table and how they chase colour between humid mornings and dry afternoons. She keeps her own swatch book of pigment pastes mixed on cotton and linen, and she is stubborn about testing ink on the actual cloth before committing to a run.