Studio Series: future tags + small disaster

Great Opa B's notes; Photo © Karen Thiessen, 2016

Last fall my mom handed me an old cookie tin that contained documents belonging to my late great-grandparents. One item was an old notebook that my great grandfather kept. He wrote with a fountain pen and his hand-writing is elegant and beautiful. Unfortunately it's written in an old German script that I'm unable to read. I scanned a few pages and digitally printed them onto fabric. After rinsing the fabric, I painted it with washes of walnut ink and black tea. In a few days I'll rinse the fabric again and then stitch them. Working with my great-grandfather's words is very special.

To digitally print the text, I used C. Jenkins Miracle Fabric Sheets and they are best used for black-and-white images (colour is a bit washed out on them). I thought it would be cool to feed my own fabric through the printer, so I ironed grocery store freezer paper to fabric that I cut to size and fed it through the printer. Big mistake. The fabric came away from the freezer paper and wrapped around the printer's roller. Thankfully my very patient husband is mechanically adept. With great care he took the printer apart, fished out the fabric, and put it all back together and it works! I will never do that again. C. Jenkins sells a strong freezer paper, but I am not going to test fate (although I am slightly tempted).