Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Printing On Fabric, A Tutorial and Giveaway!

I recently sent a fabric post card to Nesta of "Ella and Nesta's Little Room", she wrote a whole blog post about it :), and I am so glad she enjoyed it.  She was especially excited about how I made the "stamp" for the card.  Now I didn't tell her, but I was actually doing a little "Purging", you see I made this stamp way back in January 2013 for the "In Your Words" blog hop. You can click on any of my links and they will take you to a new page, so that way you can click away and still continue to read this blog post. you have to get to the end for the giveaway!
This is super easy,
  1. Find your stamp on line, I just looked up Greek Stamps, make sure you aren't breaking any copyright laws.  I found a new one here.
  2. Copy your image and then go to Pic Monkey, (It's a free photo correction site), if you want the faded background, go to the wand Effects, and scroll down to Dark Edges and mess around with it to get the effect you want.
  3. This time around, I went to Collage, picked my picture,
    Layout, Cards, 4x8, the last one with 3 small boxes on top and one long box on the bottom, placed my stamp picture in the right hand corner.
  4. I adjusted the Background (4th icon down), I made the spacing larger (67), and the background transparent.
  5. Save your Postcard Image, then go back to the the beginning of PicMonkey,
  6.  Now you will Edit the Picture. Grab the Layout card you just created, mine looks like this
  7. I'm going to write Greece over the top of the picture, Tt (text), I like Eraser Dust or Downcome for this, this time I used Downcome, faded it by 23% and I also adjusted the color to make it not so black.  While in Text I decided this time to type in my name and address as well (hope you don't mind if I don't show you that, but I put it in the left hand corner, again not so close to the edges).
    Now it looks blank because I have done that "transparent background", I want this so I don't have my printer printing out white ink ;0 on white fabric, lol.
  8. Now to get your fabric ready, you can purchase a Bottle of Bubble Jet Set 2000, I don't have any on hand so I cut my fabric to the size of the paper that will go through the printer, Iron your fabric real nice and tape it to the paper, you can also iron it onto freezer paper (they have sheets that can go through a printer, again I don't have any of these on hand) 
  9. Here is one of the important parts, how to tape the fabric to the paper (if you don't use freezer paper)
    Go out and buy double sided tape if you don't have any.


    Tape all the way across the bottom of the paper page and the top, also place tape like a large X in the middle of the paper, then place your ironed fabric on top.  Stick in the paper tray of your printer and Print. 
     I love how this stamp turned out, it looks so old school
    Now when I get ready to mail my fabric postcard for the birthday girls I will just need to embroider a circle, some wavy lines and write in their birthday.  Like I did for Nesta's birthday present.
    ohh almost forgot, you should iron it, I put a paper towel over the image and give it a good DRY Iron, to kind of set the ink.  
    I also printed this like a million years ago and just sent it to a new home after re-doing the binding, it was one of the first things I did binding on and I didn't know that you fold the binding, so I had an inch of binding in the back, I couldn't understand how people did it.
     The embroidered hand prints are my sons, he has grown so much in the over a year since I made this., the reverse applique says Hope and Love.
     You can see where I previously stitched the binding down,
    But the back looks fantastic!  I did hand stitch the binding down, definitely will not be doing that with a quilt, took forever.  The sentence on the back says, "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."
    This went to my step mom who is a Professor at William Jessup University.

    Now for the giveaway!!
    It's my first ever SPONSORED Giveaway!  So Excited to Introduce you to my friend Elita, she is an American living in Switzerland (see so much in common already) she is my crack Aurifil and Batting supplier it is so nice to have a European seller and definitely saves on the shipping cost.  She carries all of the colors of Aurifil and at a really good price!  The next time I need to pick up some Aurifil I am also going to get a Bottle of Jet Set 2000, this will make printing on fabric better.  Today she is giving away a Bottle to one of you, my dear readers.  You wash the fabric you want to use for printing in this solution and let it dry and then print as I wrote on my tutorial above.

    Since this is a sponsored giveaway, I thought I would let you check out her shop, tell me your favorite thing that she carries in the Rafflecopter prompt.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Elita is on vacation at this time, but she will be back when this giveaway ends and can fill any orders placed when she gets back, just in case you decide to go shopping.

9 comments:

  1. What a cool shop....... I didnt see where you can sign up for email. Congrats on a sponsor I hope it happens again.

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  2. Hi Mara
    so funny. I just looked at some Aurifil today from Elitas shop and saw the Jet set bottle. I was thrilled as I heard of it before and would like to try it. So your tutorial comes in very handy! Thanks so much! I normally bought some prepared fabric pages in my quilt shop which is also very handy. But there are only white and cream and I would love to try some light color backgrounds.
    So cool that you have a sponsor now.
    Hugs Martina

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  3. What a great technique! I've been wanting to give printing on fabric a try. Nice job, Mara!

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  4. Thank you for this tutorial! I love the idea of printing stamps on fabric. What beautiful design!

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  5. Thank you Mara for your tutorial and your printing is so artistic! I visited Elita's shop and I'm definitely interested in cotton batting although I could not find her shipping policy and also it would be good if she could also have a euro converter on hand!
    Myrto

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  6. So cool, thanks for showing us :)

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  7. Thanks for the tutorial. Thanks for the giveaway.

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  8. Thank you so much for the tutorial Mara, you are fantastic! I had never heard of Jet Set before, would love to try this technique, comes out really great!

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  9. I'm new to quilting and hadn't seen quilting gloves before looking at Elita's shop. Thanks for the giveaway.

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