Friday, May 30, 2014

Clothing Label Tutorial Part II

Ok, here is the second installment of how to make your own labels for your handmade clothes. Now that your material is dried, you will need to iron it onto a piece of freezer paper. You can find freezer paper in the grocery store on the aisle that the paper plates is on. Cut out your freezer paper to fit in your printer.
Then iron your freezer paper onto your fabric making sure that you iron on the paper side. The shiny side should be on top of the fabric.

Once your fabric is ironed on, you can begin to print onto it. I use Avery Design Pro to design my labels. They have lots of different templates to choose from and it's free. But you could use any imaging software that you prefer.
After you have your labels designed like you want them, you can begin to print them on your color ink jet printer. I always print out one page on plain paper before I print on my fabric.
Here I have drawn an arrow on my test page to make sure which side the copy will print on. I want it to print on my fabric not the freezer paper. In my printer, the freezer paper is facing up. Now I can print my labels out. Hurray! Success!
Now cut the labels out using my clear ruler, cutting mat, and rotary cutter.



After they are cut out, you will need to rinse them in Bubble Jet Rinse. Remove the freezer paper from the back of the labels and rinse them in cold water for about 5 minutes. After they are rinsed out, squeeze the excess water out and let them dry on a towel.

When they are dry, you can bag them up in a resealable plastic bag so that they will be ready for you to put them in your clothes. I use two strips of  1/2 inch wide Steam A Seam to bond them to my handmade doll clothes. It's just what works for me. You could also hand sew them in if you would like. I hope that this tutorial has inspired you to be creative with making labels for your handmade clothing items. 

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