Have you tried Transfer Artist Paper?

My dear friend Lesley Riley has a new book out for how to use the transfer paper she developed called TAP. The book is filled with great information including the pro's and cons of using TAP on different substrates; fabric, lutradur, glass, metal, wood, paper, clay..., examples of all sorts of different ways to use it and project ideas.

Lesley invited me to create a project for the book, I have been a faithful user of TAP from the beginning. TAP is a coated paper used with an ink jet printer, the image is transfered to the substrate with a hot iron.

The cool thing about TAP is that after your image is printed out, you can draw or add color with a variety of media to the paper and when you iron it to your fabric it is all transferred permanently.

I drew my image on sketch paper, scanned it, changed my line drawing to a warm gray color in photoshop then printed it onto TAP. I used Cretacolor water soluble crayons to paint my image, then transferred it to fabric. I used Kona solid cotton leftover from another project, it worked great. I found when I used a tighter woven fabric like cotton sheeting it felt a little stiff. I did a little simple machine quilting and used embroidery floss to add hand stitched details.

My daughter Indigo (Nina) has also spent some time working with TAP. She drew directly on TAP with a ball point pen then transferred it to raw canvas.

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Make it University Samples

I modified the design of the Metal Magic project somewhat for the workshop in Long Beach, making the kits with a piece of white cotton fabric (on right) for making the image transfer. I thought some people may prefer that look to the canvas, but I am bringing squares of canvas for people to use instead if they like that better. I also have reduced the size of the grungeboard, I like the proportion of that backing better than the larger version done in the previous workshop. If you are going to IQF Long Beach stop by MIU and say hi.

Felted Fruits Workshop is Friday at 4:30pm
Open Studios at 10:15 Saturday morning
Metal Magic 4pm Saturday
followed by the not to be missed Surviving the Runway

Playing with TAP

TAP, Transfer Artist Paper, is a coated paper that you put in your computer printer and print images onto, then you can cut out the images and iron them onto another surface; fabric, paper etc.

One happy accident I had while transferring images to organza was that if you have fabric underneath the organza the transfer will be printed on the organza as well as the fabric (cotton in my case) underneath. This creates a nice 3D effect.

In the image above I ironed butterfly images onto white organza. The cotton fabric underneath had a piece of printed paper fused to it and was painted a light yellow. The two butterflies on the left were fused onto the organza on top of the cotton fabric. The butterfly on the right was fused on the organza over a different fabric, so that it is a transparent image overlaying the text.