So, then on to step 2. I had to get my scans onto fabric. How do I do that? Digital printing!! Believe it or not, you can buy fabric that's been specially prepared and backed with paper to put through a printer. Once your images have been printed, you peel off the paper, heat set the fabric - and BAM! Bob's your Uncle and you can use this fabric much like you'd use any other.
The process sums up nicely, but unfortunately it's quite painstaking. The prepared fabric actually comes on rolls since it's primary use is to be paired with large industrial printers. I, however am using a small desktop inkjet. Awesome for me if I want to continue with this after school, not so awesome for the instructor who had to cut 20-some 11x17 sheets off this roll for me to put through our printed (Thanks Jan!).
In photoshop I arranged all my scans so that with each print two letters would fit on one sheet and thankfull the math worked out perfectly. The first couple of prints went through the printed quite smoothly, but the images were really bright, and so a lot of the details of shadows from folding, etc that aged the papers were lost. More fiddling on photoshop with levels & brightness brought those details back. So now, I jsut had to print them. Except there's no such thing as "just" in our world.
To print these puppies takes TIME. These are huge files, and our printer is wee so it takes a long time to think. From the time you send the file to print, to when it actually starts coming out takes somwhere around 15 minutes. Per print. And you can't send more than one thing to print at a time. I also have to be very careful about loading the paper - one sheet at a time, very precisely so it doesn't jam. This process means a whole lot of time spent waiting - which can drive me nutty.
My solution - multitasking! As I sent things to print, I working on other computer projects. Then I started getting into a really great groove, you know when you can do things automatically, not put too much thought into it and get a lot done? Ya, that's great - except that's always when things start messing up. Awareness, and mindfulness on the task at hand are key when doing things in my world of fabric, and cutting, and printing, etc cause once you start getting confident about how easy something is to do, you give it less attention, and anything that can go wrong does. Next thing I knew, as I was feeling good about getting this stuff done was printer jam. Eff. I jimmied the paper out, and sent a new one to print, hoping to get as much as I could done until 11 when I have to be out of the school. This one didn't jam, it printed great! Until I realized the computer had grabbed two sheets of paper, and had printed my stuff half on my fabric, half on regular paper. No good. At about $5.00 a print (paper included) and 20 minutes of my time, 2 eff-ups was a big deal. One lesson I have learned well is that when things start messing up one after another, it's time to either take a break or call it quits for the night. Don't push it. So I called it quits. 3 hours and only 4 prints done. I needed 40.
I won't bore you with all the details of the next few days, but essentially it went the same way. Some great prints, some jams (which ruin the paper) and eff ups, and a LOT of time.
In the end, I realized my math had been off and I only needed to print 15 sheets, but this took me about 3 solid nights and some afternoons in the computer lab.
But oh boy, was it ever worth it! My old highschool letters, now printed on fabric, ready to be sewn, with the detail of every tea stain, crumple, and ink smudge. So satisfying! Digital printing on fabric is changing my world!
Why yes, that's a big man-cat in the background, waiting for his chance to dive into my work.
Looks like paper, but folds like fabric!
Close-ups. I love how you can even see a shadow of the writing that was on the back side of the papers.
Even the highlighter letter looks like highlighter!
A stack of stuff waiting for the next steps and of course, gratuitous cat belly.
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