How to Transfer Images to Fabric

One of the hottest new trends right now in quilting and crafting both is image transferring. Taking a photograph or some sort of other image and transferring it to fabrics or to papers or other mediums. A lot of the techniques that are being written about are great techniques but they don't really transfer to fabric very well because they don't have longevity or washability. We have the opportunity of buying products that are pre-made like this, this is a fabric made by Jacquard. And it's a cotton fabric with a paper backing that you just run right through your printer. And these are great alternatives. This is the same type of technique done on the Lutradur just running right straight through your printer. But I'm gonna show you a couple of other techniques that are really fun to work with and allow you a lot of play and you can do a lot of personalizing of the products. The first one is using a product that you can buy at art supply stores. That's called Sewpaintable and it looks kind of like a piece of canvas and it has a shiny side and a matte side and you can print off of either side. It's really flexible and you can stitch through it. The problem is, is that you really can't add a lot of heat. So you have to be very careful if you're ironing it, piecing it into a quilt. But other than that, it's very versatile. I like to print on it in black and white. So here I've printed on this piece with a flower in black and white and I've gone in and colored it. One of my favorite things to add color with is a product called Inktense. It's by Derwent and they look like regular colored pencils but they're actually a wet medium. So you need a little bit of water and you're just gonna take the color that you wanna work with and get the pencil just a little bit wet and come in and color. You can see that it adds kind of a wet portion of color. And then as it gets dry, then it's more like shading. So you get it as wet as you want to or leave it as dry as you want to. And you can do wonderful color mixing while it's wet. So I'll grab a different color here, come in and start adding some highlights or low lights to the petal with another color while the first color was still wet. So you can just keep adding colors until you're really happy with your end result. And you get a very painterly, almost a watercolor wash look. Once it's dry, it's permanent, ready for you to use. The next technique uses regular fabric and a product that's called digital ground medium or digital ground matte, or there's also a gloss. This one happens to be white and you can also get it in clear. And this is basic cotton fabric. The fabric needs to be pre-washed and this piece has already had one layer of the matte medium put on it. I like to do two layers and I paint it in one direction first and let it dry. And then I painted it in the opposite direction and let it dry. So here I'm going to run a beat of the product. Remember that that's a digital ground medium and you can buy that at your art supply stores. And now I'm simply gonna brush it all evenly across the surface, making sure that I cover the whole piece of fabric really well and get a nice even coat on it. Then I'm gonna let that dry. Once it's dry, I'm gonna iron a piece of quilters, wax paper or freezer paper on the back. So I use just a regular quilters wax paper or freezer paper and then I can run it straight through my copier. So this piece has been printed and then I've removed the wax paper off the back. What I really like about this product is that it gives you kind of a canvas feel. So it feels kind of professional and it looks, has some visual texture already on the surface before you print. And it looks really interesting in a quilt or in a wall hanging Now my favorite technique and I think probably one of the most popular things that quilters are using right now is a product called Tap. And that stands for transfer artists paper. It was designed by a gal named Leslie Riley and now C and T carries it and they sell it to quilt stores. It's pretty easy to find. It's a paper that has an emulsion on one side and you can feel it, it almost feels like a gel. And then on the backside, it has a blue release paper. So you always wanna make sure you print it so that it prints on the white side and you heat it on the blue side. Now this is a transfer technique. So whatever you print on the front, when you release it onto the fabric, it's going to be in reverse. So keep that in mind if you have words, you'll want to print them in reverse so that when you heat it it's going to be in the right direction. So here I've used the Tap and I've printed a photograph out on some canvas and here I've printed it out on a piece of wire mesh, beautiful mesh fabric. You can take the tap and iron the printed image onto any surface, wood, tile, glass, whatever you want. Here I'm gonna show you a piece that I colored also. So again, I started with the tap and then I printed a black and white photo on it. And here it is printed out. And in this case, what I used are Fabrico fabric markers. And again, I like to work pretty fast so that I can do blending and I'll just color in with one color and this is just like coloring like you did when you were a kid. And then I'll go in with a second color while the first color is still kind of wet. Now, the thing about tap is you can't let it stay wet for too long, because if you keep it wet for too long, the top of the emulsion that's on there, will start to break loose and then you'll have little mistakes in your design. So you kinda have to work fast. Also, you need to work with a very, very hot iron. This is the release paper that was on this piece. You can see here, what you want when you're finished is for no design to be left on the release paper. Then you know that you've got the whole design transferred onto the fabric. So I'm gonna show you how to do that real quick. So here I have a photograph and you can see the white out here. If I don't trim that away, then that white is going to transfer onto my fabric as kind of a clear and it's thick and kind of unattractive. So I'm definitely gonna cut this off. You can also color that in first if you want to using a paint or the markers that I just showed. These happen to be photographs of an old water tower. So they already kind of have a broken down look to them. And when they transfer on to metal and other unusual surfaces, they look really cool. So I have this fabric that kind of looks like old paper but I think will be a nice way to show off this print. And I want a very hot, very dry iron, no steam. And you wanna keep the iron moving pretty much the whole time. And what you're going to see is you're gonna see color coming to the edge of the paper, a dark black color if your photograph has black in it, or just a change of color along that edge. It has a kind of smell to it. And you wanna smell that smell. It's kind of like having the tap cook and then you can check to see if an edge is coming up easily or not. And if it's coming up easily, chances are it's complete. And here we go we have a little bit of product staying on. So I'm gonna reheat just there in the middle a bit. And there we go. And there's that wonderful photograph now transferred on the fabric. Again, like I said earlier it's a little bit stiff. Every time you wash this this gets softer and softer and the colors never, ever dull. It's just a wonderful way to have longevity in your image transfers on fabric. Now here, I've got some metal shim. It's a fine, fine metal that you can actually sew through. And I love to do photographs on it and then stitch them directly onto my art quilts. Now the metal is very shiny and very slick just like glass would be, or a tile would be. So it's a little harder to control and you wanna make sure that as you iron it, you lift your iron up rather than pushing it around, 'cause if you push it you might move the tap photograph and then you'll smear it. So just lift the iron up, remember that the metal gets hot. So try not to touch it too much. Check to see if your photograph has released off the tap. And it hasn't yet. So add more heat. Because the metal is so slick, there is always going to be a little bit of the photo that doesn't adhere, which is really kinda cool 'cause it gives sort of a vintage look to the finished piece. I'm gonna use a scissor here to lift this up. There we go. And pull off the photo. And then we have that great vintage look. And with metal you can just sew right through it. So here's tap very, very versatile, wonderful way to transfer images for your quilts. These two quilts here, were done with two different ways. This one was done with one of the prepared fabrics. So it was a Jacquard product, very laundrable but it does lose some of its color every time that you do it put it in the laundry or have to wash it. This piece here was done using the digital ground medium. And so all the fabrics were painted with it. And then the photographs were printed on it and then pieced together in a quilt. I hope you can use some of these techniques on your next art quilt or traditional quilt when you wanna transfer an image onto it. It'll have great longevity and it's really fun and easy to use.