Evolon and Transfer Artist Paper

I’ve had a swatch of Evolon laying on my worktable for months, but hadn’t worked up the courage to do anything with it. Evolon is a microfiber fabric made by the company that makes Lutradur. Like Lutradur, it has a lot of industrial and practical uses, but artists and crafters have seized on both of these products to use for our own nefarious purposes. Evolon isn’t readily available in the US yet. I found one online source, Meinke Toy, but alas, the owner is giving up the business. Hopefully she’ll decide to find a buyer rather than completely close the store down. As she describes it, “Evolon is a nonwoven microfiber material made of nylon and polyester. You can paint, dye, print and heat distress Evolon. It will not fray when cut with a scissors and can also be cut using a soldering iron. It excels as a base for stitch, by hand or machine and works well layered with sheer elements above it.” It comes in Soft, which feels a bit like chamois, and Regular, which feels like a leather-like paper. I love the feeling of both of them.

Anyway, finally having a free minute to do a small project, I decided to try out the Evolon. I printed one of my favorite photographs of a hovering hummingbird onto Transfer Artist Paper (TAP), my favorite heat transfer paper. This is the photo:

Whenever I print on TAP I make sure to fill up the whole page so I don’t waste any of it (it’s not cheap), so I added a row of one of my new kaleidoscopes, which I made from my photo of a black and white feather. After I kaleidoscoped the image using Kaleider, I played with the colors for a psychedelic effect. This is a single tile of the kaleidoscope:

It’s best to use TAP soon after printing it — if you can’t, put it back into the sealable plastic bag that it comes in. I headed right down to my studio and ironed the hummingbird onto the Evolon. I set the iron for the polyester setting, but didn’t hold it on the surface for too long. The transfer worked great, going on really smoothly except for a few bits here and there, which added an uneven effect that I like. Then I cut up pieces of the kaleidoscope and ironed it around the edges as a frame. I ironed the Evolon to a piece of stabilizer for a backing, and sewed around the edges. Finally, I stitched on a hen’s feather. This is the piece:

Not sure yet how I’m going to mount or hang it. I’m just enjoying having it here to look at and feel. Really love the smooth, leather-like texture of the Evolon.

I know I didn’t take full advantage of Evolon’s special properties, I just wanted to see how it took the TAP. Next experiment, I’ll coat it with Digital Ground or inkAid and print directly onto it. Now, that’s REALLY my idea of fun!

Kindle-Garden Delights part 2

When last we met I promised to let you know about my adventures in making my ebook into kindle-ready form. To cut to the end of the story … here it is!

If you’re thinking of kindling yourself (no, that’s not a dirty suggestion), rather than paying someone to do it for you, the best place to start is Amazon’s own help pages.  When you run into problems, you can also check with the related Community forum – lots of questions and answers, and you can post your own queries.

My first obstacle – I don’t have Microsoft Word on my computer. My husband has it on his, but I have WordPerfect instead. One of the critical steps in kindle-izing a book requires saving the file as filtered html, which you can’t do in WordPerfect.  Now, it’s not just that I’m lazy and didn’t want to walk upstairs to his computer. Switching to the other computer meant that I’d have to load some new programs onto his computer (and that makes him cranky), and that I’d have to transport my document and image files (not a big deal, but l was so exasperated that even that small task made me cranky).

Anyway, I stubbornly decided to try the process without using Word.  This decision at least led me to a great resource —  Judith Tramayne’s videos and materials to help authors self publish books on the kindle and other ereaders.

Judith has a series of comprehensive videos that seem very reasonably priced to me, and she offers a lot of her content free – including a series of macros that make it much easier to correctly format the html document that is the best way to get an ebook kindle-ready.  I watched her free videos and downloaded the macros, and took her advice to install Crimsoneditor, a free source code editor.  From the quality of her free videos, I think that paying for the series would be well worth it.  I decided not to because I was so far along in the process that I only needed a bit of trouble-shooting to finish.  But if you’re at the early end of the learning curve, it looks like a good option.

Since my ebook was written in WordPerfect, I had to copy and paste it, paragraph by paragraph, into Crimsoneditor.  Using Judith’s macros to add the correct html coding made the process much easier.

Images are another thing – the kindle is really designed for books without a lot of images. The basic kindle is only black and white, and you can’t really do much fancy with images.

I found the html code to include images, and quickly resized all of my photos for the book in Photoshop Elements.  Unfortunately, the images turned out to be my first big challenge.  I took my nice neat html document made in Crimsoneditor and ran it through MobiPocket Creator to build the book.

For a moment I thought all was well – I scrolled through the ebook in the kindle previewer that I had downloaded from Amazon. Chapter headings … check; text … check;  and the images were all there!! Yes!! But then I got to the last page and found, to my dismay, that all 60 images in the book were also duplicated in a long long row at the end of the book. Yikes.

I looked for some answers on the community forum but never found any satisfactory explanation, and certainly no cure.  The duplicate images weren’t included in the html coding.  Instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out a fix, I decided to do what I should have done in the first place.  I put the html document and image files onto a flash drive, trudged upstairs to my husband’s computer, and fired up Word. I saved the html document in Word as filtered HTML and ran it through MobiPocket.  It worked! No trailing images. Now one thing that is puzzling — still more comfortable on my computer, I took the filtered HTML file to my computer and ran it through MobiPocket there – alas, I had the same duplicate images problem.  (Insert sad face here)…  So it actually could be that the problem was not caused by not using Word, but due to the fact that I’m saddled with Vista 64-bit on my computer (I know, I can’t stand it either). I read somewhere during my desperate search for help that Vista may cause problems with parts of the kindle-izing process.

To wrap up this saga, there was some more wrestling with the Table of Contents, but suffice it to say that I finally followed the directions carefully and after pulling out some more hair I managed to generate a clickable TOC! It’s not pretty but I’m damned proud of it, so here it is ..

Anyway, the bottom line – if you have Word, some familiarity with html coding, and a lot of patience and time, go for it and try to do it yourself. It’s very rewarding when it finally all comes together.

Kindle-Garden Delights part 1

Amazingly, I have emerged from my adventure in making my ebooks available on Kindle (that’s Amazon.com’s ebook reader, for the uninitiated) with at least some of my coiffure intact.  I have been in the hair-tearing-out stage for the last several days. But first, some history. I had little trouble making my two ebooks, Inkjet Printing on Lutradur and Inkjet Printing on Fabric, into pdfs that I’ve  had available through my Artfire and Etsy stores. The next challenge was putting them up on Lulu, where they are also available as pdf ebooks, or as printed books.

I got through that okay, so let’s move on to the next step. Are you thinking of writing an ebook (or have you already)? What’s the 200-pound gorilla?  Amazon.com, of course. And therein lies the goal that has been on my to-do list for at least a year: get the ebooks formatted for kindle to sell on Amazon. And therein languished the goal month after month, sliding down to the bottom of the list.

What do you think Amazon says about publishing your own book for kindle? I’ll tell you: “Welcome to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, the fast and easy way to self-publish your books for sale in the Kindle Store.”  Yeah, right.  Even just looking through the guides and help topics was enough to send me back to the to-do list.

So although I really like to learn new things and do most things myself, I realized that those ebooks were never going to be kindle-ized unless I got professional help.  I was lucky to have a free phone consultation with the inspiring creative-arts business coach, Jane Button.  Jane suggested I contact Joy Randall, who, among other things, helps writers publish theirs books and ebooks through her business Wisdom House.

And Joy was exactly what I needed! She took my WordPerfect file (more on that in part 2) and transformed it into a file that I could upload to Amazon for the kindle. I’m sure she has heard it so much that she’s sick of it, but Joy was really a joy to work with. She patiently answered my questions, she did exactly what we agreed to, and she delivered days earlier than her initial estimate. So ta-da! My first kindle ebook, Inkjet Printing on Fabric, went live on Amazon.com last week.

If you’re thinking of publishing an ebook that involves a format other than pdf (which can be tricky in itself), and you don’t want to learn how to do it yourself, I’d definitely recommend talking to Joy. You can contact her through her website.  There are many other options but I can’t vouch for them since I haven’t tried them.  Anyone out there have other services they’ve used and liked (or not)?

Anyway, getting that first kindle ebook made was easy – Joy did all of the heavy lifting.  But of course I had to pay her for her hard work. And you know (because I just said it) I do so love to learn how to do things myself. So therein lies the hair-tearing-out, about which more soon!

Big dogs little dogs!

I’m a cat person.  Hey, guess what my astrological sign is?  Yep, I’m a Leo.  And from the first kitten I begged my parents to get (who I named Button, for the spot on the top of her white head), I’ve rarely lived without a cat (or two, or three…).   Don’t get me wrong, I really like dogs.  But when my husband George and I see a really cute dog, we call it a “kitty pup” …   Anyway, you know from my previous blog post that I just started making pet collars from the fabric that I design.  The cat collars came first, of course.  I made this soft sculpture to display the collars from a photograph of our cat Lars.  I lengthened his neck a little so more collars would fit on … a bit of artistic liberty thanks to Photoshop.

 

Lars soft sculpture with collars galore

 

But guess what? There are a whole lot of dog people out there who want collars for their pups!  And boy, are they different from cat collars.  First, the breakaway clasp that I use for the cat collars (so they can release if they get stuck on something while they’re being bad cats) don’t work for dog collars.   You need the dog’s clasp to hold so when the collar is attached to a leash it won’t release.   And another thing that’s different between cats and dogs — cats vary in size a bit, but oh my … you’ve got your mini-sized dogs and you’ve got your jumbo-sized dogs!  So yesterday I made one collar for a mini-dog (an adult dachshund whose neck is 11.5 inches) and one for a jumbo-dog (a Lab puppy whose neck is already 18.5 inches).

This is the large collar.  The fabric is one of my new designs. I took my photos of a monarch butterfly wing and a peacock feather and blended them, then kaleidoscoped the blended image.  I had the fabric printed by spoonflower.  The collar is easily adjustable for when the puppy grows.  The person who wanted the collar taught me something else — some dogs chew up their dog tags (I don’t think even bad cats do that).  Hence, the invention of slider tags.  The tag slides right onto the collar – before it’s sewed up, of course.  You can’t add the slider if you buy this kind of collar ready-made (another reason to make a custom order, hint, hint).  I ordered the slider pre-printed.  Here’s a photo of what the slider looks like (the printing’s nice, I blurred it here):

 

Dog collar with slider

 

Here’s the small collar.  Because the dog is full grown, I didn’t leave much extra length, but it is adjustable to add about an inch.

 

Small pup collar

 

And here … a stack of dog collars!

 

Dog collars

 

And for fun, this is the tag I designed for my dog collars.  The model is Scout, who lives with my brother and his family.

I’d love to make a collar for your pet out of any of my fabric designs.  If you’re interested, just email me at HeidiRand@gmail.com  Click here to see some of my fabric designs.  I can also make a custom collar using your photographs or images.

Click here to see the cat collars listed in my Artfire shop and click here to see the dog collars.

Garden Design Fabric pet collars!

You know I love thinking up new ways to use the fabric that I design and print from my nature photographs.  My newest favorite thing to make with my fabric  — cat and dog collars! On the runway (okay, on the bed) … presenting our model, Lars!

For cat collars I use breakaway safety hardware, because we all know that mischievous cats need collars that will come apart to release kitty if he or she gets snagged on something.

Dog collars have different hardware — you can’t use the breakaway latches because they would come apart when you’ve got your dog on a leash.  For the dog collars, I sew in a “D” ring very securely, to attach the collar to the leash.

Dog collar

I make the collars from fabric that I’ve designed and either printed myself or had printed for me by Spoonflower or DPI-SF.  The fabric is sturdy cotton, and it’s waterfast — so you can hand wash the collars in cold water or spot clean.  I use interfacing for strength and protect the collars with Quiltgard (a product that’s not available anymore, it’s like Scotch Guard) to resist dirt.

The collars are easily adjustable using the slide (in the picture above the slide  is brass-plated), and the cat collars also have brass-plated bells.

I can make a collar for your pet out of any of my fabric designs.  If you’re interested, just email me at HeidiRand@gmail.com  Click here to see some of my fabric designs.  I can also make a custom collar using your photographs or images.

Click here to see one of the collars listed in my etsy shop.

Exploring lutradur : one-day workshop

Workshop taught by Heidi Rand

Sunday October 24, 2010, noon to 3:30 p.m.

$40 + materials

Learn to create art quilts and other arts & crafts with this exciting new product that combines the best qualities of fabric and paper.  Lutradur looks, feels and folds like translucent paper and doesn’t tear or fray. It’s the perfect medium for a wide variety of sewing, mixed media art and crafting.

I will give an overview and demonstrate many ways to use lutradur: sewing, inkjet prints, transfers, heat gun, soldering iron, stamps, and more… You will have time to explore a variety of effects to create a mixed media art project.

Bring your favorite art materials to try on lutradur, as well as any photos, beads, etc. for your personal project.  Bring your sewing machine if you want to use it to sew your project.

The workshop will be held at the Canyon Trail Park Art Center in El Cerrito. Class size is limited and pre-registration is required, so if you’re interested, please email me at heidirand@gmail.com

Upcoming workshops:

November 21, 2010, noon to 3:30 p.m., Handmade Gifts With Your Inkjet Printer

February 20, 2011, noon to 3:30 p.m., Inkjet Printing on Fabric

Interested? Please email me

Beyond paper : inkjet printing on alternative surfaces

In this one-day workshop, you’ll learn to make creative and unique artwork by printing on surfaces other than paper.  I’ll introduce you to several different products and techniques to print directly on fabric, vellum, transparency film, and more.

Butterfly altar

You will learn how to coat surfaces for inkjet printing with Golden Paint’s Digital Grounds and inkAID.

Golden's digital grounds

We’ll also print directly on metal and wood veneer — since a printer with a straight path is required for these surfaces you may not be able to do this with your current home printer).

We will complete at least one printing project per person at the workshop.

The workshop will be held on Sunday September 19, 2010 from noon to 4:00 p.m. at the Canyon Trail Park Art Center in El Cerrito, and the cost is $60 plus materials. Class size is limited and pre-registration is required, if you’re interested, please email me at heidirand@gmail.com

Garden Design Fabric Bowties!

I have gone bowtie crazy!  George has been after me for years to make him a bowtie.  Evidently they are really hard to find and good ones are quite expensive.  Then recently an old friend asked me whether I would make her some neckties from my fabric designs. I got a McCalls pattern that had both a necktie and a bowtie.  Sad to say, I quickly realized that making the necktie was going to take more time than I had .. .  But the bowtie — now that was a different story.  It was far less complicated than the necktie, and took much less fabric.  So here’s my first effort … what do you think?  The fabric is one of my favorites, a design I made by kaleidoscoping my photograph of a purple laelia orchid.

Bowtie number one

Here’s the bowtie on the proud model, George.

George wearing bowtie number 1

Bowtie number two is also from the McCalls pattern.  I used another of my favorite fabric designs, a kaleidoscope pattern from my photograph of a butterfly’s wing.

Bowtie number 2

How do you like it on George?   For this one I used the standard bowtie hardware, a hook and clasp and adjustable slider.  I had to order the hardware online because none of the local fabric stores carry it.  Contact me if you want information about where I got the hardware.

George wearing bowtie number 2

Here’s my third bowtie.  I found great instructions on a blog for boys’ bowties, and just made it a bit larger for a man-sized bowtie.  This is a double fold tie.  I haven’t had a chance to make the strap, so I’m using one of the bowtie clip-ons that I got when I ordered the other hardware sets.

Larger bowtie

This is the back, showing the clip-on hardware.  You just slip the gizmo through the tube at the back and clip it onto each side of the shirt collar.

Back of bowtie showing clip-on

George was too tired to put on the shirt to model it, but I got some shots of him holding it up to his t-shirt. Here’s one:

Mr. Bowtie

And another … !  I figured out how to print the fabric for this design using letter-sized sheets of fabric, so I can whip up the bowties rather than waiting for yardage to be printed for me.

Honeybee design bowtie

This is a closeup of the center loop

Honeybee design bowtie center loop

This is the original file I used – my photograph of honeybees in a hive, kaleidoscoped into this design:

Honeybee kaleidoscope design

Tired of bowties yet?  Okay, just one more.  My latest is made of fabric I designed from my photograph of a swallowtail butterfly wing.  I kaleidoscoped a small part of the photograph using the Kaleider software program (see my other blog posts about Kaleider).  I love how brightly colored the fabric turned out –

Swallowtail bright bowtie

I just started showing the bowties in my Etsy store.  Click here for my first listing. I can also make them to order from any of my fabric designs, so contact me if you want to special order one.

Art Quilts & Fabric Hangings : One-day workshop

Workshop taught by Heidi Rand

Canyon Trail Art Center, El Cerrito California

Saturday June 19, 2010 – noon to 4:00 p.m.
$50 + materials

Lars quilt

Further adventures in the exciting new world of fabric printing!  Offered for the first time — a hands-on workshop where we will explore printing your fabric and designing a small art quilt or hanging.  Even if you’ve never made a quilt before, this workshop will teach you basic art quilt construction.  We go beyond quilts used for bedding, by adding embellishments and mixed media elements, and framing or hanging options.   Basic inkjet printing and sewing knowledge is helpful, but not required.

Golden butterfly art quilt on canvas

I’ll show you many examples of the kinds of art quilts and hangings you can make using your inkjet printer and sewing machine. You’ll get lots of new ideas about what to do with your images and designs, and the knowledge to go home and start making your own personal fabric-art piece!

Lavender rust quilt

Bring a flash drive with your images, or letter-sized images to scan.   If you want to begin sewing your piece at the workshop, bring your sewing machine and some possible backing fabric.  Pre-registration required.   Please email me at HeidiRand@gmail.com

Upcoming workshops:

Saturday July 17, 2010 noon to 4:00 p.m.  Inkjet transfer techniques. El Cerrito Canyon Trail Art Center

Sunday August 29, 2010, noon to 3:30 p.m. Photo Art : Altered Imagery. El Cerrito Canyon Trail Art Center

Sunday September 19, 2010, noon to 4 p.m. Beyond paper : inkjet printing on alternative surfaces.  El Cerrito Canyon Trail Art Center

Sunday October 24, 2010, noon to 3:30 p.m.  Exploring lutradur.  El Cerrito Canyon Trail Art Center

Sunday November 21, 2010, noon – 3:30 p.m.  Handmade gifts with your inkjet printer. El Cerrito Canyon Trail Art Center

Have questions? Interested in registering?  Please email me

If you can’t make the workshop, I also have an ebook to teach you to print on fabric and online classes at CraftEdu

Saturday June 19, 2010, noon to 4. Art quilts and fabric hangings. El Cerrito Canyon Trail Art Center

Printing on wood veneer

I’ve written before about transferring my inkjet images and designs to wood.  I’ve done some printing directly onto wood that I treated with Golden Paint’s Digital Grounds, but not much because I haven’t had great success finding veneer that’s flat enough to print.  I ordered some veneer online from Rockler, great price – but it was too warped to send safely through the printer, and although I found directions to flatten veneer, I just didn’t have the interest in doing that step on top of all of the others needed to get a good inkjet print.

I have been using small flat pieces of the Rockler veneer to make wooden postcards using Transfer Artist Paper (TAP), more about that another day.  Oh, okay, here’s a photo of those wooden postcards – I will write a whole post about my process to make those soon.

Wood veneer postcards using TAP

So anyway, I had great hopes for the first inkjet-treated veneer that I’ve found, available through Cards of Wood, called SMartGRAIN™.  I was excited that it could go through the normal feed of my small printer.  Thicker wood veneer has to go through the straight path of my larger printer.  This veneer is thin enough to curl through the normal feed.   I got the starter kit from Cards of Wood.  Their price for the kit is $25 for 6 letter-sized sheets.  After that, you buy them by the sheet, and they’re $5.25 each.  They also paid the shipping for the sample kit, which was nice.

For my first test, I chose an image that I thought would look good on wood, and one that I had printed on veneer that I coated with Digital Grounds, for comparison.  This is the original file for my Koi and Wisteria blended collage.

Koi and wisteria blend

The image is abstract, but there are sharp elements, and I wanted to see whether the inkjet coating was of good enough quality to reproduce the sharpness.  This is the result on the new inkjet-treated product from Cards of Wood:

Koi wisteria collage on wood veneer

This is the same image printed on veneer that I coated with the clear gloss Digital Ground.

Koi wisteria collage on wood veneer treated with Digital Ground

I much prefer the print that I made on the veneer that I treated with Digital Ground.  The detail is much better – part of the collage is a garland of wisteria blooms, and the Cards of Wood print is blurry, with no sharp detail.  The color of the Cards of Wood print is a bit brighter, and it’s close to the original image file, so that’s good.  I’m very finicky about detail and resolution in my prints, though — it’s very  important to me, and it shows how good the quality of the inkjet coating is. I should emphasize that I’ve printed on many unusual surfaces, and I never expect that a print on things other than paper will look the same as on good inkjet paper.  I do know that the color and grain of the wood will affect the quality of the print.  That’s why I did the comparison between the Digital Ground-treated print and the one on SMartGRAIN™ wood.   I’m not convinced that the Cards of Wood product is worth the money.  I will print the rest of the four sheets and let you know my final verdict.