Homemade Printed Cloth Labels

Ok - here is the tutorial to go with my post on making your own cloth printed labels.

You will need

1 A4 T-shirt transfer sheet - I used an Avery sheet that was free in a paperpack sample :)

Some plain cotton tape

A utility knife/craft knife

An inkjet printer

Household iron

Baking paper

Ruler – a stainless steel one is best so that you don’t cut into it

Scissors

The first thing you need to do is design your label - I did this in Word but there are lots of other apps that you could use to do this.  It’s best to keep it simple so that your tag doesn’t look too busy.  I just put my crafting page name ‘Bumble Bee’s Craft Den’ and a little heart.  You can fit quite a few onto one A4 transfer sheet. This is a snapshot of my wording, I got loads more onto the actual page though.

Here's mine

You will need to reverse the writing before printing so that when you iron it on, it is facing the correct way.  The only way to do this in Word that I am aware of is to go to ‘Print’ and then to ‘Printer Options’ and ‘Advanced’ – it should show ‘Mirror Image’ – you need to change the ‘off’ to ‘on’ and then print your page.  

Note that the print preview will not show your document as a reverse image so the best thing to do is to check that it prints ok by printing it on a normal sheet of paper first before trying it on the transfer sheet.  Once you are happy with the print and have checked that it is printing in reverse you can go ahead and print it on the transfer sheet.  You place your transfer sheet into your printer so that you print on the blank smooth side and not on the side that has the product info printed on it.

Once you have printed out your text onto the transfer sheet you need to use your utility knife to cut labels out.  I used a self-healing craft mat whilst doing this so as not to spoil my desk!  It’s easier to cut them into strips rather than a tag at a time.

You are now ready to iron on the strips of transfer paper onto your cotton tape.

Use a medium hot iron taking care not to melt the transfer paper.  Place the transfer paper with printed side onto the tape and iron.  You will need to go back and forth a few times to ensure that the transfer has adhered to the tape.  Let it cool then peel off the transfer paper.  You should be left with the printed text on your cotton tape.  I then got a piece of baking paper and placed it over the tape and ironed it again to heat set it.

All that you need to do now is to cut them to size.  I used a lighter to quickly move over the ends to seal them to prevent fraying but do check that your tape melts rather than burns before doing this!  you could also use a dab of clear nail varnish instead of the lighter if you like.

Here is my finished result

Hope you are able to follow this tutorial easily and make your own tags.  

 

 Thank you xx