Session 3: Pattern Transfer Techniques

All right. Now that you know exactly which tools to use, we're ready to start putting our pattern onto our fabric. This is a very important part of embroidery, because it's... Unless you're doing sort of doodle stitching and you're just stitching as you go or practicing a stitch, you wanna be able to see what you're gonna be working on. So, I'll give you a little preview. This is the sampler as you will download it with the content that comes with this class. You'll see here that it shows you all the stitches and has some words on it. The easiest way to transfer a pattern to your fabric is actually to use a removable fabric marker. And then I taped mine up on my sliding glass door but you could do it on a window. You just want it in front of a light source, and then trace it on. Now when you're tracing it on, definitely test your removable fabric marker first. So do it maybe on the corner, make sure it's gonna come off and that you know how to take it off. It could be that some markings will become permanent, such as like tailor's chalk if you heat it. So that's a good idea to like read the rules of whatever marking pen you're using. But I like to use heat removable fabric markers and that's what I did here. So I taped up my pattern on the sliding glass door and then I actually taped my fabric over it. And I transferred the pattern. Now you can see that on the pattern here, we have a dotted line stitch. That's to imply that you'll be using a running stitch there. And on my pattern, I wanted to show the actual box lines that I could keep my... I didn't have to, you know, subscribe myself to the exact stitches that were on there. So I did a dotted line along the top of that box and then a solid line around so that I could work my way around that box, keep it nice and straight. But I knew that one was going to be a running stitch. Same goes for, say, on the feather stitch here where it shows a dot where all of the vertical lines are the starting points. So put the dots on as required. You'll note I didn't transfer any of the words just because I have this pattern to refer to. And it's a really great way to like, you know, keep the pattern by you while you're stitching so you can see what it will look like when it turns out. And also, if you accidentally rub some of your stitches off while your working, or some of your marking off. You would not rub your stitches off, that'll be strange. You would see, oh okay wait, this is a square and I need to finish the corner as such so keep that by you while you work. And that's the first format for transferring your stitches. It's pretty easy, and it's probably one of the older methods, using the window to transfer it in. There's also iron transfer pens. These pens, are made by Sulky, the one I have. They make all different types. This is the packaging for it, but as you can see, I've opened it. And the way this works is it's gonna make a permanent mark on your fabric. So whenever you put it, you need to remember that that's not coming off and you need to cover it with your stitches. So, there are some instructions for basically filling the tip here with whatever... With the liquid inside when you first start using it. Those are right here on the pen so read those and make you get that right. And then all you need to do is get a piece of fabric, which we have right over here. And whatever you want your design to be. So I'm gonna draw a little freehand mustache like so. And maybe I might write like mustache underneath or I must stash you a question, whatever you wanna write. Remember with this that this when this transfers, you need to reverse your words. I'm gonna show you a trick to that real quick. You can always go over these marks again if you're worried that they will not show up, but remember again, wherever your mark is on this paper, it will show up. So see how there's that like breaking that line there, that break would show up. Okay. Once we get that on there, you need your iron. You want it to be on the highest setting possible for your particular form of fabric. So I'm just using a cotton, a lightweight one, and then you're gonna turn your words with the ink side down directly onto the fabric. And you hold it, count to five, count to 10. They recommend moving it slightly so none of the little steam holds on your iron causing parts of it to not show up. You hold. I think in total you can count to 30 seconds if need be. I prefer to use a dry iron, but if it's not coming through fine, you can also use steam. This one, I think either one will work. Always refer to the manufacture's instructions for whichever type of iron transfer pen you get. And there you go. You can see it's right down on there exactly how I drew it. Now you're thinking "Oh, those words are backwards", but oh, on this side, the words are going the correct direction. So that's a trick. Go on and iron it onto the wrong side of your fabric, and then just flip it over, you can see the words correctly. Now, maybe you wanted to do a word and you don't wanna try and worry about that or something, so I went ahead and used a big, thick marker that's gonna show up really easily. I wrote the word love and then I turned that over, and I put this piece down over and I traced it with my pen. And I did that on a light source so it was easy to see because it's kinda hard to see through here when I'm trying to trace it. Now, I've transferred this so that it's reversed already. And I'm gonna take that, put it right up here, hold down and kinda move it over a little bit. I'm gonna hold and move, and hold and move a little. Again, you can... You wanna use how much time your transfer pen calls for. So it might be 30 seconds, it might be 10 seconds. And you can see I transferred it and it's going the correct direction. Now the nice thing about these is that once you write it on your paper, you can actually just do it over and over again and it's gonna keep showing up. It will get a little fainter but you can ink over it if you want. And that's how I didn't hold it as long so it's gonna be much fainter. But you can see, it's gonna look fine, you can do it multiple times and maybe you need to embroider some shirts with the same thing, go ahead and use this. So that is an iron transfer pen. Now let's talk about iron transfer patterns. These are the most common type of pattern that you might pick up when you're out and about. There are lots of different brands. But what you wanna do is open up... Let's move our iron aside for a moment so as not to burn ourselves. You're gonna open up your package and you will find... Whoop. You get a really big sheet just like this. And you can see I've cut some designs out of it already. You get a sheet and you get all these instructions. It's really nice that they give you like a tester such as this, so that you can, you know, test it out on a part of your fabric that you're not necessarily gonna use to embroider, but that way you get an idea for what you're gonna do. Now, of course, you wanna read the instructions but basically, these ones all work about the same. And you're gonna take your iron and set it to the hottest setting possible for your fabric. And we're gonna use that piece of fabric. Okay, and we're gonna take our piece of fabric here and give it a press real quick. Make sure you have a dry iron that you're using. Then, we're gonna take our design that we have and make sure that we don't have any part of it that we don't want. So you can see up here there's the design pattern number. We don't want that cause that will actually transfer to our fabric. So I'm gonna make sure to go ahead and cut that out. You're don't have to be too careful with it. Maybe you don't want the word Sunday there, or you don't like the . Cut out any part you don't want. So I'm actually gonna cut off Sunday, I don't want Sunday on there. Now once you have your design exactly how you want it, you're ready to put it on your fabric. So you're gonna put the page... The page with all the writing on it face down, then you're gonna in it in place. Make sure you use pins that you can in fact iron over. Do not use pins that have a plastic head on them because then they will melt to your iron. I have learned that the hard way. All right. So pin it strategically so it stays right in place. And then you just press down, and you hold it in place for a minute. The instructions actually say to move your iron around, so as to say like to run with the iron, which is why they want you to pin it so that nothing will move. That's fine. I like to be a little more secure. I don't move my iron too much when I'm doing this because I am worried about creating double lines. But these iron transfer patterns are actually removable so they tend to just wear off overtime or to... You can wash them off usually. Just check the instructions to know for sure. So there you go. Transferred nice and neat. You can see I have my pin here so it didn't get quite close enough. I could try to line it up perfectly, that's a bit hard to do. But I would be comfortable just drawing that one line in that I missed. So bear it in mind when you're pinning it as well. Pin where you don't... where there are no lines. There you go. That's iron transfer patterns. There are two more forms of transferring patterns that I want you to know about. So, let's say you're working with our sampler pattern. And there's a version of this in your downloadable content that is just gray scale and very simple. This is a freezer paper method. You can see I actually have attached the fabric to freezer paper here and I have taped it in place very carefully. So what I did is I ironed this freezer... I cut out the piece of freezer paper eight and a half by 11. I ironed it to the wrong side of my fabric. It has some lint on it. And then I taped down the top edge here where it was gonna go through the printer. And this is a way of permanently putting the pattern on your fabric. So if it's a design that maybe you're gonna use and it's gonna take you a while to finish cause it's pretty intricate, this is a great way to do that. And so you can see the freezer paper pulls off fine, it doesn't actually leave a residue. And you wanna pull that off entirely, mine's pretty taped up so I might leave it for right now. But this version of the PDF is available in the downloadable content where it's just this gray scale version. You can barely see the lines. And the reason I made it that light is so that you can stitch over them carefully and cover them with your and then you'll never see them again. But you have all the main ones that you need. You have your dots for your feather stitch and your lines for your break stitch, and your lines for your cross stitch. And you can also see which boxes should be running stitches and which should be back stitches. So that's the freezer paper method. It's a permanent method of attaching a pattern to your fabric. Now, I know you're wondering, what of I wanted to embroider on a dark fabric, right? Well, don't worry. There's a method for this as well. You see we have the embroidery tracing paper. This is pretty easy peasy. It's just sort of like a treated form of paper that has on one side chalky residue that's gonna come off on your fabric when you... When you put it on there. So, I'm going to take this and then I want a design to use so let's find... Here it is. Let's find this little guy here. So you can see, you can just put fabric down first, then your tracing paper, then your design. I'm just gonna do this little mushroom here. I have a stylus. If you look at this, it just has two different ends. One is pretty fine point, the other end is a little bit thicker. But this is just a tracing stylus and it can be used for any number of things. I like to use it for this just because it's a little... I'm not worried about ripping the paper as I would be by using a ballpoint pen. So, all you have to do id trace the lines as they appear on your pattern. Press firmly as you go. Now you'll see when I take take this up, this can be a bit of a delicate form of tracing... Of transferring a pattern, but when it comes to putting it on dark fabric, this works pretty well. And it should stick around at least for a little while. You can also get pattern makers paper that has the wax residue on the back, and that will in fact stay on longer but you have to wash it off. So, you can see it's pretty light but I got that mushroom drawn on there and if I'm working in a high light situation, it's pretty... It would work pretty well. I could use that easily. I could make it darker by pressing harder. You could also instead use tailor's chalk or a... Like a white wax pencil to transfer it on but those you have to be careful with because you will need to wipe those off before you perform any heat on the fabric, whereas this will just wipe off with a wet cloth and it's easy peasy. It'll probably wear off pretty quickly. I mean if I brush it, it might. It might disappear a little bit, and that's mostly because maybe I didn't press as hard as I needed to. Be sure when you're doing it that you're doing it the fabric straight on a hard surface such as the one I have. If you're doing it on a patted surface, maybe like the ironing board here, it's not gonna transfer very well. And make sure that you only have one layer of fabric underneath. So, those are all the many different ways to transfer a pattern to fabric. There's probably a few others out there but these are the ones I find to be the most successful. So choose one that you like and transfer your pattern to your fabric because up next, we're gonna get stitching. I'll show you how to start your stitches and finish those off successfully.