Saturday, June 13, 2009

Small Studies - Coca Cola Building

I love working with digital images and printing on fabric. There's an old Coca Cola building in downtown Asheville, NC where I took many pictures and decided to do a small study using one of them. The windows are old, weather worn and surrounded by crumbly bricks - real interesting. This is the finished piece. To get it ready for printing, I manipulated the image in Photoshop, enhancing the color and contrast a bit.
I used a 300 count Egyptian cotton sheet. Sheets make wonderful printing material as the really high thread counts making the surface very fine for printing. The fabric was treated with Bubble Jet and printed on an Epson using DuraBrite inks which are both lightfast and colorfast. The Bubble Jet is watered down 3 to 1 (water to BJ) and only when using DuraBrite inks. If using without DuraBrite, use BJ full strength. I use Bubble Jet with DB inks as it does enhance the color. The fabric is "attached" to a piece of 110 lb. card stock using a fabric adhesive spray.
I then bind all edges with blue painters tape. This really protects the printer from getting lint and fuzz from the edge of the fabric as the ink cartidges run across the fabric - side to side and in contact with the fabric edge. It's time consuming but I get great results and I think it's easier on the printer. I also run a lint brush across the surface of the fabric for any unseen "fuzzies" that could come off in the printer. I use a lint brush whose cartridge is already "linty". This way it doesn't pull the fabric off of the card stock as a new, stickier tape would and it's still sticky enough to get excess lint. Can you tell from the brush below that I have a cat with black fur?
Here is the fabric print as it came out of the printer.
I removed the fabric print from the card stock and mounted it on a very low loft batting -  Thermore by Hobbs.
I machine quilted it and added some image transfers of Ivy for more dimension.

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