Making Fabric Postcards from Injured Prints

This week I’ve been super busy making some fabric postcards for the upcoming Arts on Stage event I’m participating in next month, and along the way discovered that injured prints make fabulous postcards.

This is a print that really went screwy. It was printed using digital grounds on textured fabric (it’s a real pain in the *** when these prints go wrong because it takes so long to prep the fabric) and the image printed out in a portrait orientation instead of landscape and subsequently the right hand side of the image got chopped off severely.

However even with the chopped of main image, I thought there might be enough of the image left to make an interesting postcard.

Here’s a tip for you …

Using a “viewer” to fussy cut your fabric or images makes things a whole lot easier. A viewer is easy to make – simply determine the size of your project and for a postcard I use 4″ x 6″, then cut a hole out of a piece of cardstock. Position the cutout area over your fabric to determine what looks best for your project and when you’re happy with what you see, mark the area using a fabric marking pen or pencil then cut it out.

This is what was I ended up with for my postcard which looks kind of interesting don’t you think?

And if you’ve never made a fabric postcard before, they can’t get much easier than this. For my image transfer fabric postcards I print out my image (or in this case I salvaged one from an injured print), cut to size some fusible peltex and a piece of cardstock for the back (I like to use a pre-printed backing on my postcards and if you want a copy you can download a copy here then print it out onto cardstock or fabric). And I also sometimes use machine wrapped cording to finish the edges.

PS I’ve been asked a number of time how I join my machine wrapped cording when I use it for edging or couching so check back tomorrow and I’ll show you.

And once everything is fused together and the edging added, here’s my postcard.

Front …

and back …

Fabulous!