Designer Craft Connection Blog Hop: Painted Printed Patches Tote Bag
What's my favorite tool? I'm glad you asked because right now I am crazy about my trusty little black ink laser printer. I use it non-stop for printing things like invoices and documents but did you know that you can use it for all kinds of wonderful crafts like making resists for etching metal and glass? And get this - you can use it to print on fabric too! Roc-Lon makes a lovely smooth canvas-like fabric that can be run through a printer to make sheets of designs. Then to add color, I like to mix up Ann Butler stamp pad inks with a little bit of water and apply then them like paints. You can use original artwork but for this project I used clip art from Dover Publications (I have a serious Dover addiction!).
Seeing as how the theme for this month's Designer Craft Connection Blog Hop is "Handmade Gifts", here's a fun project that can easily be customized to fit any occasion.
Here's how:
Painted Printed Patches Tote Bag
Materials:
- Ann Butler Crafters Ink by Clearsnap: Berry, Sunshine, Lilac, Tangelo, Limelight, Aquamarine
- Phoomph™ for Fabric bonding sheet - Stiff / Black - two sheets
- Roc-lon® Multi-Purpose Cloth™
- Plain Black Tote Bag
- Black thread
Tools:
- Dover Publications "Oriental Designs" Clip Art Book
- Access to computer, black ink laser printer (I use a HP Laserjet), graphics program (I use Photoshop)
- Fine paintbrushes / cup of water
- Westcott Brand Scissors
- Sewing machine
- Iron
- Paper towels
Instructions:
1. Load in clipart from the disk into your computer. I chose various round designs from this book.
2. Make an 8 1/2" x 11" Photoshop document with all your selected clip art designs sized and ganged up to fit the page. (If you don't have Photoshop, use your favorite graphics or word processing program to prepare your artwork for printing.)
3. Cut two 8 1/2" x 11" pieces of Roc-Lon fabric and load one into the printer. Print the Photoshop document onto the fabric. Repeat for the second sheet of fabric.
4. The ink on the printed fabric sheet needs to be heatset so that it does not smudge. Put a clean paper towel on the sheet, ink side up and set the iron down on one section of the fabric. Use the high heat setting and let the iron sit for about 20 seconds. Try to avoid moving the iron like you were ironing normally because that can actually smear the ink. Lift the iron and move it to another section of the fabric repeating until you have heat set the entire fabric sheet. Repeat for the second fabric sheet.
5. To make a nice ink paint, use your paintbrush to mix a little Ann Butler ink with a few drops of water in the stamp pad lid. Color in the black and white designs with the various inks. You'll find that the inks get brighter if you let the cloth dry a little and then add more coats.
7. The Phoomph fabric bonding sheet is a thick foamy fabric that has adhesive on both sides, each protected by a white release paper. Remove one of the white release papers to expose the adhesive. Press the painted fabric sheet onto the adhesive and smooth down well.
8. Cut out the painted circle shapes. Remove the backing release papers on each circle and apply the shapes to the black bag (like stickers!)
This is such a fun project - it's like making your own coloring book pages and who doesn't love coloring? The Multi-Purpose Cloth is a lovely surface for printing and isn't it cool how you can paint with the Crafter's Ink stamp pads? And think about everything that you can print! Oh how it makes the mind spin..... :) I'm planning a set of black hot mitts embellished with printouts of Alice's White Rabbit. (I've also got a color printer so I'll have to test that baby out too!) Stay tuned and I'll show you soon!
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You can see lots more fun handmade gift ideas by following along on the Designer Crafts Connection Blog Hop. Just click on the "hop forward" or "hop back" buttons on the badge to visit the next site. You'll be inspired when you see all that the Designers have created!
