Showing posts with label CRAFTS. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

from: http://www.upcraft.it/archives/562

Textiles: Print Your Own Fabrics

June 15, 2010

Epson R1800 pigment inks, with constant feed system.

If you own a printer that uses pigment inks (rather than the cheaper dye based inks) you can follow these instructions and print your own fabrics.
Beware: Some printers do not like printing on fabric, and using this technique could damage your printer.
Now that the warning is out of the way here is how you can print your own fabric:
Choose a light coloured fabric, and cut it to the maximum width that your printer can handle. I have an Epson R1800, so I can take just over A3+ width of fabric. If your printer supports printing from a roll, then you can make the fabric as long as you like.

Attach the fabric to backing paper with double sided tape.

Attach the fabric to a piece of backing paper using double sided sticky tape. The backing paper should be the same width as the fabric, and about the same thickness as copy paper. If you are using a roll feed printer, you could get away with using thin wallpaper or backing paper.You should place the sticky tape at both ends of the fabric, and at several places along the length of the paper.
The purpose of the tape is to stop the fabric from wrinkling up inside the printer, so make sure that the paper and fabric lay flat together without any creases.
Feed the paper into the printer as though it were thick card. On the Epson R1800 I use the roll feed to accept the paper, because the paper enters the printer at a shallower angle.
Create your design on the computer, and print it out. Keep a constant eye on the printer, and watch that the fabric doesn’t get creased or jam up the head. You might want to fiddle around with the brightness / colour settings on your printer to get the design looking right. Each fabric is slightly different, so experimentation is going to be necessary.

Leave the ink to dry for a few minutes, and then remove the backing paper.

Let the design dry for a few minutes, and then pull the fabric off the backing paper. The design should be safe to machine wash, but make sure it’s a cool wash. Hand washing might be preferable if it’s the first time you’ve tried this technique, because not all inks are the same.

Close up of fabric print, showing texture of fabric.

When the material is dry, iron at low temperature on the reverse side, with a piece of scrap cloth underneath – just in case the colours transfer by heat.

Source: http://www.urbanthreads.com/pages?id=508

Sweater Boots

As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing the DIY movement can’t do. It seems to be able to turn anything into anything, kinda like if MacGyver really got into sewing. Well, one of the DIYers favorite upcycling materials is a bulky old sweater, and today through the magic of craftiness, it’s going to be transformed into a pair of super cute sweater boots! Ha. Bet MacGyver never pulled that one off... (Note: not that I’m dissing MacGyver. In any way.)

So, to make our fantastic sweater boots, you’ll need:

Cheap pair of flat shoes (used for the base)
An old sweater with big bulky sleeves
A hot glue gun
Cutaway stabilizer
Water-soluble stabilizer
Embroidery design
Buttons for embellishment
Needle and thread
Scissors

To start, cut the sleeves off right where they meet up with the sweater. You should have two long tubes. Put the rest of the sweater aside for now.

Before we start gluing anything, we need to shape our knit into a “boot”-like shape, which you’ll mock up on your own foot.

Take a sleeve and turn it inside out. Slide it onto your leg so the cuff of the sleeve is up your calf and the open wider end is down by your foot. Keep the seam of the sleeve on the back side of your leg, so it lines up with your heel.

Slip on your flat shoes and stretch the open end of the sleeve around the edges of the shoe.

As you can see, just stretching the sleeve over the shoe creates feet that just look like giant triangles. We need nice shaped boots. Keeping the sweater knit pulled over the toe, pinch the excess back towards your ankle so it forms to the shape of your foot. Pin this excess in place. You’ll find you’ll have to pull the most excess from the back, heel and bottom of your foot to get it to form a nice shape.

Once you have your shape pinned in place, cut off the excess left behind. (Stretch your shape over your shoe again before you cut to make sure it can still fit!)

I found there was a lot of excess down by my heel in order to get it to shape nicely, so I cut off some of the knit there too. It’ll help me know where the edge of the knit should be on the shoe when we glue it later.

Repeat this again on your other boot, so you have two pinned and shaped boot forms.

Remove the shoe and carefully slide off the boot shape without disturbing the pins. You should have two wonky boot-like shapes all pinned up the side. Take your boot shapes under your sewing machine and sew a seam down the newly trimmed edge. Be sure to make your seam wide enough to catch both sides of your stretchy knit.

Keep your shape inside out, and place your shoe inside the form, heel inside the knit. The back seam should be on the same side as the heel, as shown. Shuffle the knit around a bit so it’s stretched evenly around your shoe.

It’s time to heat up that glue gun and go to town! Run a line of glue just above your rubber heel, and glue down the edge of the knit. Start back at the heel to make sure the seam is centered, and then work your way around the shoe. I’d recommend taking in a little excess around the sides of your shoe - it’ll help with the nice formed shape.

Although these won’t be winter-worthy boots, the hot glue is a surprisingly sturdy way of attaching the knit. Once it’s dry, your knit won’t come off easily.

This is my shoe with the knit glued all the way around the shoe. If you like, you can snip off the excess knit above the glue line before we flip it right side out.

Carefully turn your boot right side out again. These cheap, bendable shoes are best for this, because you can kinda fold it in half to better get it right side out.

Slip on your little booties to test the fit. Wonderful! I now have cute little sweater boots formed just for my feet! But wait, we’re not done yet. Right now, the top of the boot is just the ugly old cuff of the sweater. I have better plans...

Grab that sweater again, and snip off about 6-10 inches of the bottom. We’re going to use this part to make cuffs for our boots. Once you’ve cut this piece off the bottom, snip it in two.

We’re going to use the finished bottom edge of the sweater as the bottom of our cuff. Take one of your snipped pieces and wrap it around your boot. It’s up to you how tall you want your boot to be, and how long you want the cuff to be. You can have a tall boot and a short cuff, or a short boot with a long slouchy cuff. I opted for the middle ground.

Mark your cuff with pins, and trim it to the size you want. You need the top to match the width of your boot, but I flared out the bottom a bit. I also trimmed the height of my boot a bit. Do this for both cuffs.

Before we sew our cuff together, we’re going to add a bit of embroidery! I’m going to add a small fleur de lis to the middle of my cuff that will face outwards.

Now, to embroider on stretchy, chunky knit takes a few special steps. You’ll need a layer of cutaway stabilizer under your knit, then the knit fabric, and then a layer of water-soluble stabilizer on top. The top layer of stabilizer will keep the stitches from sinking into the knit. Also, be extra careful not to stretch your knit too much when you hoop it, otherwise it’ll bunch up again after it’s embroidered and unhooped.

I embroidered both my cuffs with some pretty fleur accents, and then unhooped them. To remove the top stabilizer, don’t soak it, but gently tear it away. You may need a little tweezers to get all the little pieces out. Trim the excess cut-away stabilizer on the back too.

Now we can stitch them into cuffs. Fold your fabric right sides together (so the embroidery is facing in) and sew a seam up the side on both pieces.

To attach the cuff, we want to sew it to the top so it can fold over and display its pretty embroidery. Turn your cuff right side out, with the embroidery visible to the world, and tuck it inside your boot, with the embroidery facing the side where you want it to be on the outside of the boot. Line up the top of the cuff with the top of the boot and pin it in place all the way around, making sure the back seams are together.

Once it’s all pinned in place, sew a seam to secure the two together.

Flip your cuff right side out. Now you have a pretty sweater boot with a pretty cuff! It looks kinda slouchy and weird just sittin’ on my desk, but just wait ‘til you get them on…

As one last little touch, I’m going to sew a button to my cuff to keep the two layers from shifting too much, and just ‘cause it looks cute.

Slip on your slouchy sweater boots, and tromp around your home in style! They’re super cute with a pair of jeans, leggings, or a skirt.

Simple embroidery adds a dash of color and charm to your comfy boots, and lets you personalize them to your own styles or whims.

Even MacGyver might not believe you made these yourself from a pair of cheap shoes and an old sweater! Simple, cheap, and oh so hip, especially when you make and personalize them yourself. Have fun flaunting your new cute boots!

What? You want more boot tutes? Happy Together did the sweater-into-boots thing twice, as a mother-daughter pair. leethal on Craftster went classy with argyle sweater-boots, and cool and summery with knitted mary janes. Tutu Maker went dark and gothy with over-the-knee boots made of ... duct tape, of course. The possibilities are endless.

DIY – Single Use Antibiotics Packs

The ongoing trend in the consumer market of providing small, ready-to-go, individual size packages of consumables has been a win-win for the lightweight and ultralight backpacking communities. Always looking to shave a few extra ounces or grams off of our overall pack weight, these individual servings are the perfect fit for trail snacks, drinks, condiments – you name it.

However, these nicely packaged individual servings can come at a premium. They can often be pricy or difficult to find without going online and ordering in bulk +shipping. That’s when the creative types among us come up with ingenious solutions that lets us make our own alternatives using things we usually have lying around.

Which brings me to today’s topic – individual size packages of antibiotics cream. I’ve carried a few of the Neo-to-go (Neosporin) packets with me as part of my first aid kit for quite some time. They’re small, handy and easy to use, but they have some downsides. Firstly they are expensive, secondly each packet contains way more ointment than I need for a small cut or graze – an awful lot more and once it’s been opened it shouldn’t be reused or saved.

I recently stumbled upon a really clever solution to this problem that involves a tube of antibiotics ointment (generic), a plastic drinking straw, a Bic lighter and a pair of needle-nose pliers (I use my Leatherman Squirt PS4). For the life of me I can’t find the website that I saw the original version of this on so I’m going to repeat it as best I can remember – apologies to the original author.

We’re going to make very small, single use packets of antibiotic ointment using a generic alternative to Neosporin and a clean (unused) drinking straw. If you’re like me and have kids, chances are very good that you have an open tube of antibiotics ointment in your medical cabinet. On its own it is too large to carry on a backpacking trip, so we’re going to re purpose it.

Place the straw over the opening of the ointment tube and carefully squeeze in a small amount of the ointment that is approximately one quarter of an inch in length. You’ll notice that transparent straws work best for this.

Use you fingers to squeeze the end of the straw so that it pushes the ointment further up inside the plastic straw. This will provide a clean area for sealing the end of the straw without having the ointment ooze out while you are holding it with your pliers.

Hold the end of the straw with your needle-nose pliers so that a small amount of the straw is protruding. This will be used to melt and seal the end of the straw. Take your Bic lighter and carefully melt the end of the straw so that it forms a seal. I like to quickly pinch the melted end with my pliers to ensure a good seal.

Turn the straw around and find the point where the ointment went up to inside the straw. Pinch just past that with your needle-nose pliers and cut off the excess straw with a pair of scissors making sure to leave a small amount of the straw protruding for sealing with your lighter just as you did in the first step.

Now you have a single use packet of antibiotic ointment that you can carry with you as part of your UL backpacking first aid kit. These are also perfect for EDC carry in a pocket or even your wallet.

I’ve yet to have one of these burst or fail on me. Simple, affordable, and very convenient. A great way to make use of those open tubes that are lying around with just a small amount of ointment left in them. Pretty clever idea that can be used for other purposes, what do you think?

THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2011

Making Your Own Pattern: a tutorial

Patterns aren't cheap. Seriously, I was browsing through through the look books at Hobby Lobby the other day and some of them were as much as $20. Tack that on to the price of fabric and other supplies and suddenly sewing your own clothing becomes very expensive.

Thankfully, you can make your own patterns using your own clothing that you know to fit well. I'll show you how to make a simple blouse pattern using a top of my own.

I used Scotch Postal Wrapping Paper as my pattern paper. I found it at Target for about $5. It gives you 30 feet of paper, so it will last a long time.

I used paper because I like to lay my pattern piece down and trace the shape directly onto my fabric. If you think you'd prefer to pin the pattern to your fabric and then cut it out, paper may not be the way to go for you.

Muslin fabric is another great material that would allow you to pin the pattern piece to your fabric. It's also nice because it can be folded up and stored away when not in use.

Lay your garment down on the paper and determine the middle of the top.

Mark right above the collar and right below the hem.

Draw a rough outline of one half of the top.

When you get to the sleeve, do your best to fold it back so that you just see the armhole. Sketch the curve as shown below.

This first pattern piece I'm working on will serve as the back of the pattern. Sketch the outline of the slightly higher, back collar. Stop once you get to the half marks that you previously made.

Now you'll need to sketch an outline outside the dotted line to allow for seam allowances.

To determine how far apart the rough sketch line should be from the final outline of the pattern you'll need to take what materials you're working with into consideration.

For example: The lace top I am using has a stretch quality to it. If I want to use this pattern to make a top with a non-stretch fabric, I will need to make the final pattern outline a good amount wider than my rough sketch. However, if I was using a non-stretch garment to make my pattern I wouldn't have to allow for as much extra fabric.

It's always better to have a too big pattern and therefore a too big top than it is to go too small. Don't be afraid to be generous.

Extend the outline by about 1.5 inches along the sides and about 1 inch at the armholes and collar.

Extend the bottom of the top by several inches to allow for hemming.

Cut on the line and fold the pattern over making sure that the crease is on the middle marks you made previously.

Trace so that you have a perfectly symmetrical pattern.

Repeat the same process for the front piece of the pattern being sure to trace the front part of the collar this time.

Now for the sleeves. Fold a piece of paper and position it underneath the garment and the pattern. The fold should be parallel to the top of the sleeve.

Trace the curve of the front pattern piece. Leave plenty of extra room for the sleeve to be hemmed.

Remember it's better to go oversized than undersized. You can always take the shirt in if it is a little too big.

Cut out all of your pieces and press to get rid of creases and you're done!

*Update*

I recently used this pattern to make this cute little top. Click on the picture for the full tutorial!