The Quilters Guild of Indianapolis asked me to do a demo of my photo quilt labels a few months back and as it turned out, I was awaiting the next issue of Quilting Arts Magazine with a label published in their readers’ response section: It’s Your Turn. I told my critique group, Indyfiber, that I had submitted and had gotten a rapid response wanting larger photos to print, and my friend said “I should do that, too.” And she did (she does lovely hand written labels and frequently uses beads on them and her facings}. We both ended up having our pictures and label info printed in Aug/Sept issue and then presenting to the guild. Then as it came time to plan for the quilt show, they asked if we (and the handful of other members who presented) would do demos at the show. We just did that on Friday.
Here is the label printed in Quilting Arts and the photo of the Arno River and bridge is on the front of the quilt.
There are always loads of technical questions when it comes to printing on fabric! Some of the questions being things like what the differences are between the types of setting chemicals and pretreated, prepared sheets, which leads to ink types and printer preferences. Today I found a wonderful blog post on a fellow quilt artist’s blog about her experiences, old samples, preferences and technical info. I think she did a fabulous job giving concise information and lots of it! So I will refer you here to Gloria Hansen’s post.
I even learned a couple of things due to her working many years back on developing ways to make printer inks waterfast and lightfast before Bubble Jet Set was on the market. I also began printing on fabric before Bubble Jet Set, but had little dye experience and was not dyeing my own fabrics then. I used Retayne, and would probably still be doing so if Epson hadn’t developed wonderful pigmented inks which don’t need chemical setting and brought them into the home printers.
I have a love/hate relationship with my Epson R1800, but still plan to buy another Epson. I have my eye on a newer model that I hope to get soon which will hopefully do something I have been wanting mine to be able to do, but is very limited in that capability. It is a medium format (13″ wide) pigment based inkjet. I have always said it needs a special button that says “Print anyway, Damn It!” The printer wants paper to be perfectly aligned and will adjust the paper if it detects it is not perfectly aligned. Unfortunately fabric does not have a perfect edge, hence it more often rejects my fabric than to accept it. It has unfortunately taken too many hours to get it to print what should have taken less than an hour. It prints beautifully and makes me so happy when it prints in an accepting manner!
Here is another label. This one is a photo I took in Venice of gondole and was the photo used to make an original painted collage that was then printed on fabric and again painted.
I will have to do another post on how I print my labels in the future.
Looking at the Venetian photo above, I must end with,
Ciao, tutti!