Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Fabric Transfer Drawings

Sunne Spot Studio welcomes homeschoolers to the Studio every Tuesday morning. Yesterday we made fabric crayon transfer drawings. Here was our process:

First was the drawing part: on plain paper we drew with these special fabric transfer crayons. They are very similar to drawing with regular crayolas - except only about 6 colors. Not a problem for our artist here who is a pro at blending and shading. Next we flipped the drawing onto polyester satin and ironed to transfer the colors with all of the prerequisite parchment paper protecting the iron and the board. A fussy process, but after a few tries the part about keeping the drawing from shifting and creating a kind of shadow effect got easier.

Note: you can find crayons that work with natural fibers, these happened to be the kind that only work with "man"-made fibers, thus: the polyester.
This clever artist then cut her picture square from the fabric...
...(you can't really see this) and layered the fabric picture on the top with some WonderUnder fusible web to a square of felt underneath for stability.
The ironing champion at work:
And the results! That is my flower in the lower right. I have just started to hand stitch it, working along the lines to embellish the drawing. I can't wait to see how the anime girls look with stitching.

Homeschool kids are great to work with. Love it. Love it.