Printing on Fabric: The Marauder's Map

Once upon a time, I was a biochemist working in research at a pharmaceutical company. Then I had my first baby and knew I wanted to stay home with him.  But I still like to do experiments. 

I saw another quilter on Facebook who is doing a Project of Doom quilt.  One of her blocks is the Marauder's Map.  She found a picture of one online and did some editing of the picture so that the map is tinted like old parchment and looks like it has been folded.  She then printed it out  on fabric using her ink jet printer.  She very graciously shared her jpeg file with other quilters.

I haven't tried printing of fabric before.  One of the reasons is that I don't want to make a quilt like that unless I'm sure the printing is going to be of good quality and colorfast.  I've seen a lot of memory quilts with faded pictures on them and don't want to make a labor intensive quilt that doesn't last. 

My first step was to choose the best printable fabric I could find (Dritz's Printed Treasures).  This kind of cloth backed paper isn't cheap, but I used my JoAnn's coupon.  It still cost over $30 for 12 sheets.  There WERE less expensive brands available, but they all said things like 'hand wash' or  'washable, but don't use detergent'. In my world, I use detergent when I wash things, and I think most people do.  This quilt is meant to be used.  I expect it to get dirty and need a good washing .  So after I printed out 3 test sheets, I started my experiment.

I removed the paper backing like the package said.  One peeled of fine, one stuck a little and one stuck a lot.  The paper that was stuck to the back of the fabric came off when I soaked the sheets in water as the package recommended to wash away excess ink. Then let the sheets dry flat, again like the package said.  The package didn't say to heat set the ink, but it did say it was safe to iron the printed fabric with a warm or silk setting on the iron, so I did that.  I zig zagged the raw edge of my test sheet and got started. 

Printed sheet number one got washed twice in cold water with a low temp dry (like the package recommends) and twice in a load of jeans with warm water and high temp dry.  I wanted to do a worst case scenario, I'm sure the girl I give this quilt to will be careful when she washes it, but I also know that sometimes other people want to 'help' do your laundry for you, and they aren't always careful.  I think most people have a laundry horror story:  the time you washed a sharpie, crayon, or chap stick, or the time your husband turned all your baby boy's onesies pink.  I wanted to make sure this quilt could survive a basic error like wrong water temperatures.

 

The sheet on the left has not been washed.  The sheet in the middle has been washed once in cold water.  The sheet on the  right has been washed twice in cold and twice in warm.  You can't see from the  picture above, but there was some fading on the sheet I washed in warm water.

 

 

For my purposes, that amount of fading is acceptable.   Here's my completed Marauder's Map block:

 

 

Thanks again to Sue for making her file available!  She did a lot of work to make this map.  If you want to see more of her work, search on for the Project of Doom group on Facebook.