I was told by the technician on Wednesday that the designs would be transferred onto my chosen fabric via heat transfer paper. I was slightly worried at this point that the prints would turn out like my earlier experiments of using heat transfer paper that you can put in your printer at home. I really didn't want the feeling/texture of the designs to turn out really stiff and plasticy like it did before. Anyway I went about preparing my file to print, this had to be in Tiff format, I wasn't really sure how to do this but it ended up just being a case of changing the file format when you save it. The art work that I was sending to the printer had to be a maximum with of 140cm as that was the width of the big rolling heat press that is used to transfer the ink from the paper onto the fabric, and then the length was how many metres you wanted to print.
On Thursday I went to John Lewis to get my fabric. I was told the previous day that the fabric had to be as close to 100% synthetic as any lesser content of man made fibre could result in colours bleeding and fading. However when looking for appropriate fabrics it was really hard to find 100% synthetic fabric with a nice feel/texture to it so I ended up getting 2 metres of one that was 85% polyester and 15% cotton which was surprisingly quite soft. I also got 2 metres of another much thicker white fabric that was 100% polyester with a shinier finish. This at the time was my least favourite of the two.
The process of preparing the artwork took quite long as I had to find out the measurements I wanted to make my cushions and resize the images to fit into these squares. The designs that I produced were regular landscape rectangles so a lot of the time I had to crop out some of the image so that it fitted into the square shape of the cushions. This was not ideal as every time I did this I lost some of the image. This is perhaps something I should have thought of before making my designs. Despite the lengthly process the format and preparation of the designs was easier than I originally thought as earlier on in the project I was worried about learning how to repeat patterns on photoshop as I had only just come to terms with the basics of this software.
Printed on 85% polyester + 15% cotton
Printed on 100% polyester
I decided to print two metres. When preparing the fabric and paper to go into the heat press, I accidentally cut the fabric too short and so I couldn't put it through the roller. Luckily there is a smaller heat press for smaller works, so I used this to print the medium square cushions (40cm by 40cm) on the lesser man made fabric. I had to cut out the design on the paper and also a piece of fabric the same size. I then placed the piece of fabric down first and the paper on top of it with the design facing the fabric. This process was quick as after 30 seconds it was done and the revealing of the printed design was really exciting.
I particularly liked the bottom right print on the picture above. Originally this is the design that I was more reluctant to have printed as I thought I would be too bright and busy for the look that I had in mind but the fabric toned this done a bit and I really liked how the colours turned out.
The second piece of artwork that I had printed contained cushions (60cm by 60cm) that were too big to put in the smaller heat press so the bigger rolling one was necessary. Having learned from my previous mistake of cutting the other fabric too short, I made sure that there was enough fabric for the paper this time.
The larger rolling heat press made the prints a lot more consistent that the smaller heat press as pressure was constantly being applied and moved around the different areas of the paper and fabric. This along with the fact that this fabric had a higher content of man made fibres and that it had a shinier finish made for a much better look with brighter colours and more detail.
I was really pleased with how the prints turned out as this process produced outcomes that were very different to the result of using heat transfer paper you can use in your printer at home. The feel of it was not rigid at all and area the design was printed on felt just like the rest of the fabric as it was essentially just the inks that were transferred not any additional coating on the paper.
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