Printing On Fabric Tutorial

Good morning!  As promised I will give a little tutorial on how I print on fabric.  I share my good with my bad as you will see later. LOL.

Supplies you need...

-Freezer paper which can be found at most grocery stores.  I have enough in this roll for a lifetime!Freezer paper has a paper side and a shiny plastic side.  This is a must.

-A piece of regular 81/2" X11" printer paper.

- Pencil and scissors to cut paper and fabric.

- Fabric... I used already coffee stained osnaburg fabric I had on hand.  NOTE: After printing on fabric I have never had luck coffee staining after printing on it.  You could also use muslin.  Both fabrics are readily found at Walmart if you have fabric in yours or JoAnn's.

- Of course a printer LOL

- An ironing board and iron

Tear off a piece of freezer paper big enough to cut out a piece of it the size of your copy paper. Trace around the copy paper.

My freezer paper cut.

Take your fabric to your ironing board and iron the piece flat.  Use your cotton setting no steam.  The mottling marks are the way it took my coffee stain.

Next, with the shiny plastic side down touching the fabric, press the paper onto the fabric.  You should be ironing it on the paper side.  Make sure it is good and stuck to the fabric.  Take your scissors and cut around the paper.  Try to stay as exact as you can.

You can print either words or pictures or just about anything you want.  I will warn you colored pictures sometimes don't come out as planned as you will see later.

This next part will take some know how on your part.  I use Microsoft Word to create mine.  You will need to know how your word processing program works.

In Microsoft I opened a new document...

Page Layout tab

Page Orientation... Landscape

Columns...2

Margins 0.5 all the way around

Insert Tab

Picture

Now go find the pictures you want to use or words.

I found mine here on Graphics Fairy

 As you can see I put two in the first column and one in the second column.  You will need to fiddle with the size two get them to look right and still be able to have enough space to cut them out with a margin around them.

OK... I think I'm ready to print.

I have to load my fabric in my printer face down.  This is important to know how your particular printer prints.  If you have to, mark a piece of copy paper with a small mark and do a print test to see what side it prints on.

 Make sure there are NO loose strings on the edges of the fabric or that it is not longer than the paper.

After it is loaded hit print.  I will be very honest and say the first time I ran this through the printer it did not pick it up.  It happens!  Don't get discouraged.  Mine actually caused a paper jam. LOL.  So, I gently pulled it out of the jam.  Then I found a couple loose strings and trimmed those off.  Sometimes it will take you re-ironing the paper onto the fabric.  Just keep trying!  My son and I actually had one that would not go through the printer.  We tried everything and finally scraped that piece and cut another and it went through just fine.

This is how mine turned out.  I must be running out of ink because if you notice my birds are not the same color as in the screen shot.

 
Oh well, they still look spring like.  LOL  You can either frame these, make them into bowl fillers, attach them to paper mache boxes, the possibilities are endless.  I haven't decided what I'm going to do with mine yet, but I will let you know.

Have a great day everyone!