Non-toxic transfers

In a short, but very satisfying, class at MCBA yesterday, Lin Lacy took us through three kinds of non-toxic transfer techniques. All can be done at home with minimal equipment although one demands a run out to a copy shop at some point.
Packing Tape Transfers
These are similar to using gel medium, but they're much quicker! Simply lay down a strip of packing tape on a magazine image, burnish it with your bone folder and soak it in water. After a bit you can rub the paper off the back of the tape and you've got a shiny strip of image. Here's the before and after of a magazine photo of the Minneapolis stone arch bridge and skyline.
And a helpful hint for getting rid of the sludgy water: run it through a used coffee filter and you won't clog up your drain.


Ink Jet Transfer
This one is also easy-peasy! Run some images through your ink jet printer onto very cheap photo paper. Wet the paper you want to transfer the image to (you might have to experiment here, depending on the paper), and lay the ink jet image onto the paper (image side down). Simply rub the back with a paper towel and peel up. Here's an Indian textile I copied and transferred (the transfer is on the left). You can see where I missed a spot, but otherwise it's very cool!

Heat Transfer
This was the big finale and the technique that Lin uses all the time. The fun part is that you can transfer a black/white or color image (including text) to anything: metal, glass, wood, leather, unglazed tile, fabric and of course, paper. Plus you don't use any solvent! The images are as gorgeous as your original! You'll need to take your images to a copy shop that has a Canon laser copier (in Minneapolis you can go to a Rapit Print shop). This won't work with a Xerox or other copier. As Lin said, "ask them to bump up all of the colors and mirror image your sheet of images." Take your copy and cut out the image you want to use. Simply put your image face down and iron it with a very hot, dry iron using a lot of pressure. Peel your image back while you're still ironing (it sticks when it cools) and your transfer is done. If it sticks, just reheat it. You can see examples here of a photo on paper, an insect collage on silk and some experiments we did with scratching and hole punching on a piece with black toner. One of the things I'd like to try is transferring images onto silk and then coating it with polyurethane and letting it dry. The silk becomes "crisp" enough to be a book page but still has a luminescent quality.

Lin has done some original collages and copied them into a fabric Abecedarium book. All of these images are transfers of her original collages onto silk which are then sewn onto the fabric pages.


I had to ask Lin how this technique was discovered and it's a good story: A textile artist friend got a call from another friend who had been ironing and somehow ironed the text from her dissertation onto her husband's cotton shirt. (Was she using the paper instead of an ironing board? I have no idea.) She rushed right over...not to save the shirt...but to see how she had done it! The paper had been copied on a Canon copier and that, as they say, made all the difference.