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I love to print on fabric and I know that you do too! Today begins the series Printing on Fabric 101 which will help to demystify the process.

Today we begin at the beginning with The Basics – this is the very least you need to know and do in order to print on fabric.

So let’s get started …

What you need

• a photo or an image – you can find sources for copyright free images here
• fabric to print on – either
  commercial fabric sheets which are already pre-treated and backed with paper
  or
  a piece of fabric and some freezer paper
• an inkjet printer

Prepare Your Image

If you need to resize, adjust or touch up your photo or image in some way, you will first need to scan your image or photo into a photo editing program such as Photoshop Elements or similar.

Alternatively if you have an all-in-one printer, you can simply place your photo in the copier and use the copy option to print it out. With this option remember – wisiwyg – what you see is what you get. If you have a poor or fuzzy photo to start with, your printed image will also be poor and fuzzy.

Prepare your Fabric

If you’re using commercial fabric sheets then you don’t need to do anything to prepare them – they’re all ready to go.

If you’re using your own fabric, then you’ll need to adhere it to a paper carrier so it feeds through the printer easily. The easiest way to do this is to iron your fabric onto a piece of freezer paper.

Please note:
If you want your printed image to be water resistant or permanent and washable then you’ll need to treat the fabric with a solution called Bubble Jetset 2000 or use special printer inks, and we’ll discuss this is another lesson.

To adhere your fabric to freezer paper …

1. Cut a piece of freezer paper to standard copy paper size. In the US it’s 8.5″ x 11″.

2. Next, cut a piece of fabric slightly larger than the freezer paper.

3. Iron the wrinkles out of the fabric so it’s absolutely wrinkle free, and then iron the fabric onto the waxy side of the freezer paper.

4. Once the fabric is ironed onto the freezer paper, trim the edges of the fabric even with the paper. You can do this with scissors, but it’s much easier to do it with a rotary cutter and ruler.

Make sure there are no threads hanging over the edge and that the fabric is perfectly adhered to the freezer paper otherwise you risk jamming your printer.

You can find additional information about using freezer paper here and an alternate method using sticky labels here.

Print Your Image

Now you can feed your fabric through your printer in exactly the same way that you feed paper.

Note: If you’ve never printed on fabric before, you may want to do a test first or use an old printer so you don’t damage your good printer. You should be able to print on fabric using most inkjet printers but there are some that work better than others. More on this in a later lesson.

Every printer is different so before printing you may need to adjust the Paper Type Setting on your printer to allow the printer to print on thicker paper and you may need to adjust the Quality Option Setting to Photo. It’s always a good idea to do a couple of test prints to see what settings work best.

If you’ve prepared your fabric properly, your fabric should feed through the printer without jamming.

Peel the fabric from the backing paper and you have a lovely print that you can then use in your projects.

NEXT … Washable Prints

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