A new way to transfer images - new for me.

I recently was inspired by a friend who had been to a paper workshop in which she used Cirtasolv to dissolve the inks on old National Geographic magazines to produce some lovely new papers.

It only seems to work on National Geographic papers. Well, she did get a bit of movement with an old BOM weather calendar, but it wasn't as good as the National Geographic.

I had a look online when I got home and found that Citrasolv has a link dedicated to using its cleaning product for art!
Having watched a few videos, it seems that National Geographic magazine has clay used in the printing process (or the paper itself?) and that might be what makes the difference.

I had some Orange Power solvent and thought I would give that a try but it didn't seem to work. I didn't have much and it was old, so it might be worth trying again at another time.

Then, as I was reading about these cleaning products, I thought: eucalyptus oil does that cleaning too.It probably came to me as I have been using it recently for my heavy head cold (it clears the sinuses wonderfully, especially if you put a few drops into steaming water, put a towel over your head and inhale - works wonders, keep a hanky nearby).

So, having read the other product information sites, I had a photo printed on a laser printer. The sites say that inkjet won't work.

I washed some cotton, to make sure the sizing was gone, and tried it.
I put the photo face down and taped it with masking tape around the edges, to make sure it would not move around.

Then I gently brushed on the oil. The paper instantly became transparent.
I rubbed it gently with the back of a teaspoon for a little while - not long at all.

Peeking to see if was working. 

The image has transferred. The printout is still not too bad either but I think I got all the transfer I was going to get.

I have rinsed and ironed it and nothing seemed to come off it. As it is only going to be an experimental wall hanging piece, I didn't give it a thorough testing of fastness.

I put cotton batting behind it, into a hoop,  and used free motion sewing to highlight the different areas.

I cut the batting away to the edge of the image and then wrapped the sides around some mount board.

There was a little bit of frayed cotton under the fabric when I did the transfer and it is clearly visible so I will have to be more careful if I do another.

The piece is for my machine embroidery group at the EGV. Our monthly theme this year is Farmyard. This month's topic was farmer or farm worker, neither of which enthused me. Then I was browsing my photos and came across this one of a bee and the sunflower in our backyard.

The bee is doing the pollinating - a worker. What would we do without them??

Taking the time to do something properly

I have decided that I have to take the time to try to be a bit more scientific in my approach to printing out my digital images.  I have been trying to get images for deadlines, rather than taking the time to really experiment.

I have another image that I printed out using the TAP paper.  I did it for our ATASDA group.  We were meeting just before the Moomba Festival and the challenge was to produce something for that theme.  As usual, I was wanting an image straight away, I hadn't given myself time to really work on a design.  And I was in the midst of trying to work out the best way to print out some fabric using the home printer.

photo

The design used a photo I took a couple of years ago, some words, some pattern put into one of the words and a little bit of distortion of the reflected word. I enhanced the hue and saturation a bit also.

digital image

The colours have come up much brighter than my swan images, both the TAP one and the treated cotton one. It is actually quite good colour, much more intense than the ones I had produced using the swan images. As I had used a different image, it didn't really tell me how the different image transfer techniques compared.

That's the trouble with trying to compare products, you should only change one thing at a time but I am too impatient and want to use the fabric in a particular way - NOW.

Perhaps I will take the time to do some proper experiments, making sure I use the same base fabric, the same computer settings, the same image, the same hue and saturation settings, etc.  I will have to stop being frugal and say that I am experimenting, not trying to produce fabric for use in a specific quilt or artwork.

And I'll have to make sure I use the proper iron settings - here is an example of what happens when you forget to turn off the steam when using the TAP. 

And here is what happens when you forget that you are using a transfer technique and you should have reversed your text (and the whole image, really).

  Fortunately I had done the above two images rather small so I didn't waste a lot of TAP and fabric.