Soft Fabric Photos - Learn how to pre-treat your fabric for photo transfer
QuiltingCoach Penny
Marv and Jeannie Spears share their process for pre-treating fabric for photo transfers. In our Eavesdrop on a Telephone Conversation, Marv and Jeannie Spears talked about many topics relating to how to create beautiful and long-lasting memory quilts using a photo transfer process. The key to the pictures you transfer to the fabric lasting generations is to pre-treat your fabric. In this short clip, Jeannie tells how their process works. It's so easy, a kid could do it! Listen to the call and read the transcript of this section: Penny: I don't know whether now is the time to cover the difference between your particular process and others. I notice that you have some special dips you use other than the Bubble Jet that's available off the shelf. Jeannie: Before there were commercial, pretreated fabric sheets, we developed our own method for making the images permanent. The thing about the inkjet printer ink is that it's water soluble. Unless you do something to the fabric before you print on it, the prints will wash away when you try to wash the quilt. The process we use actually uses a dye mordant to set the inks. It involves soaking the fabric in a solution for an hour. Then you iron the fabric dry and iron freezer paper onto it. You cut out your fabric sheet in whatever size you want to print on. Then you put it through the printer. After it's been printed, you set the image by rinsing it in a weaker solution of the same chemical. That gets rid of all the excess dye and makes the image permanent so it can be washed. Penny: Then you iron it. Jeannie: It's the same concept as the Bubble Jet, but in our testing it holds the color better. That's why we use it instead.
Click here to order a CD recording of the full interview
Happy Quilting!
Penny Halgren
TheQuiltingCoach
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