Transferring Photographs to fabric

This thread painting of my husband’s mate and his dog, Fox, began as a photograph that was transferred to fabric and then free machine thread painted

This is where my journey of printing without a press began. I wanted to create a family memorial quilt - that was just photos on fabric with lots of patchwork around it. Gradually that morphed into thread painting and I still find the gentle rhythm of thread painting very relaxing. Maybe I will talk about thread painting in another post as for the easiest results the photographs need to be posterized (reduced number of colours) and have hue intensity) by slightly altering in a photo program. Mind you when I started I didn’t do any of that.

The first problem with printing photos onto fabric comes with the fact that the fabric is floppy and doesn’t feed through the printer well. It needs to be stabilised. I have used stabiliser on the back of the base fabric and I have used ironing freezer paper onto the back of the base fabric. The base fabric must be cleanly cut so there are no lose threads that can catch in the printer. I use an Epson printer as it prints straight through without turning the paper/fabric in he printing process.

Most times now I use a product called terial magic. This comes in a spray bottle and once the base fabric is cut to size you spray it with the terial. Let it dry and then iron it. The fabric becomes stiff enough to put through the printer. If required the “stiffener” can be washed out at the end.

All of the art works above began as a photographic transfer. Some remained just as the photograph on fabric, others were worked into in a variety of styles. Some were created as a challenge of thread painting to get depth into a single colour. both the pet portraits fell into this category