Three Bears Prints: Beautiful Things of Utility! Part 1

Over the last few weeks, I've been using the excuse of tidying up Estelle's room to make different things which are both beautiful and useful! Below you can see the drawstring bags I've been making by printing on fabric.

Drawstring bags using some of my illustrations

Details of the duckling design

Reverse side of the duckling bag

Close up of panda bag.

Dachshund drawstring bag

I would like to show you how to make the dachshund drawstring bag shown here on your left.

I am going to show you how I print onto fabric using a computer printer - but please note, if you would like to do this, you are doing this at your own risk!

All of the illustrations you see here are available to buy through the Three Bears Prints Etsy shop. Here's the link to my shop:
Three Bears Prints Etsy Shop

You can find the panda, ducklings and dachshunds in this section of my shop.

1. Spray mount onto card.

1. First of all, you will need to work out your design and the measurements for your bag. I use Photoshop.

I used Photoshop to come up with an oblong dachshund design measuring 16cm x 48cm. The measurements of my canvas was 26 x 64cm so that I had lots of space for seam allowances.

I cut a piece of card measuring 26 x 64cm. (I am lucky enough to have a printer which can up to 32 x 67cm.)

I put newsprint down to protect my table, and applied spray mount to the whole of the piece of card.

2. Smooth fabric over sticky card.

2. Cut your fabric (and use fabric which is fairly thin) a little bigger than your card. Iron it then carefully smooth it over the card.

4. Perfectly smooth surface.

3. Trim fabric.

3. Use a metal rule and very sharp craft knife to trim the fabric.

4. This produces a flat, perfectly trimmed surface on which to print.

5. Printing the fabric

5. You can now print your design. Make sure you set up the print options correctly - so for me, I have to choose custom print and put in the size of the card, and set it to 'high quality' printing.

Depending on what I'm printing, I will also increase the contrast, and decrease the brightness of a design, to compensate for the light fabric.

Carefully feed the fabric cover card in, and watch it as it feeds through the printer, to make sure it doesn't jam.

6. Close up of printed dachsies

6. You can see that you can print really high quality, detailed images!
At this point, I would waterproof my fabric by spraying the same protector on them such as you would use to protect canvas bags and shoes.

I'm a fairly novice sewer, but drawstring bags are easy. I looked at this blog post for some instructions:
http://notesfromthekitchentable.com/2013/01/30/how-to-make-a-drawstring-bag/

To summarise, you sew the edges, leaving a gap where the string (or in my case, ribbon) will go...