Incorporating a photograph in your project.
If you have an actual photographic image that you would like to incorporate into your project, you can do it rather easily, if you have an ink jet printer available to you. One method is to use commercial transfer paper as your printer medium and print a reversed image onto the transfer paper. You can then transfer this image to fabric following the instructions for the transfer paper.
However, a simpler method we have found involves printing directly onto the fabric you wish to use. The easiest fabric to use is muslin. Using unbleached muslin gives an aged look to the picture, where using bleached muslin gives more accurate color reproduction. The procedure for direct printing involves the following steps.
Prepare the image: Using an image in a digital format, size the image to the actual size you wish to use in your project. For example, if you wish to print the picture to fit on a particular Paper Piece, you will need to size the picture to completely cover the piece including seam allowance, while ensuring that the image you wish to have shown is fully on the face of the piece.
As mentioned, the image must be in digital format, that is from a digital camera, scanner output from scanning a conventional photograph or a photograph you have had converted to a digital image by a commercial service.
Prepare the fabric for printing by ironing the fabric onto the shiny side of a piece of freezer paper. The next step is to cut this fabric paper combination to a size of 8 ½ inches by 11 inches.
Use your computer to print directly onto this paper fabric combination using an ink jet printer. Note: Do NOT use a color laser printer as the freezer paper will do extensive damage to a laser printer.
After printing, the freezer paper is peeled from the fabric and the fabric is ready to baste onto the paper piece. If you wish the picture to be color fast, the fabric should be given a colorfast treatment prior to cutting to size and basting to paper piece.
