Priting photo's onto fabric

[ANNE E.]

I want to print some photo's onto fabric I want to make a memory quilt for my son and daughter out of my husband shirts. They won't be large quilts so I thought it would be good to put some photo's of their Dad, it would also make the quilt a bit bigger. It's nearly 2 years since my husband passed away and I am just beginning to feel that I can do this.
I would be grateful for and thoughts as to the best /easiest method of doing this.
Thank you
Anne

[Wendy G.]

Hi Anne - I love memory quilts like that. I have had several students make memory quilts of family members. One style that works well and can easily be done, is to start with photos all about the same size - say 4"x6". Be sure to use Printed Treasures to print the photos on - at this size you can print 2 photos on each page. Once all the photos are printed and cut to the same size (with a seam allowance); give each photo an inner and outer border. One student framed each photo in 3/4" finished black border and then a second border made with a wide variety of Hawaiian print shirts at 2 1/4" finished. This gives a finished block of 7" x 9' . If you have 8"10" photos to include you can make the borders of the smaller picture blocks each 1/2" bigger and then combine the 8"x10" pictures with the "framed" smaller pictures. If you have a mix of Portrait and landscape style pictures, adjust the borders to get a common size. If you don't have enough photos you want to use you can also fill in the "photo space" with other shirt fabric, pockets from shirts, or even bits of T-shirts. I made a photo quilt for my daughter Allyson and included pictures of "big game" tickets, High School and College Logos, Her passport and other memorabilia that was special to her.
Have a wonderful trip down memory lane making your quilts~

[ANNE E.]

Thanks Wendy, I have never printed onto fabric before.
A friend has given me some EQ Printables ink jet fabric sheets so I am going to try that.
Thanks again
Anne

[ANNE E.]

The EQ Printables are wonderful and should work great.
One trick with printing on fabric is to go in and adjust the photos to be darker/more vibrant; TQS had a show on doing this quite a while ago....one of the earlier seasons. It was all about how to adjust the photo settings and printer settings for the best results. I used those techniques/tips to great success in doing my son's comic strip quilt (we printed scanned copies of a comic strip he wrote; it still looks great these 6 yrs later...).

If you can find that show, it will give you some wonderful tips on how to truly make this look wonderful. You might need to get some extra fabric sheets so you can do a few test runs. Or, you could start with one photo, edit it & "save a copy", then continue editing to different levels. Save each step as a new copy, and then print all the varieties (note which one is which) on one sheet; they'll be smaller sized obviously, but would allow you to try the multiple different levels of editing without using more than one or two sheets of fabric. Then use this "thumbnail" preview sheet to select which photo looks the best, and use those editing settings for all the photos you plan to use.

Hope that helps. It's going to be a wonderful quilt, I'm sure, and a precious walk down memory lane for you all. ((Hugs)) to you as you work on this.

[ANNE E.]

Here is the show that I watched/tips I used when I did mine.
https://thequiltshow.com/watch/show-list/video/latest/show-702-quilting-in-the-digital-age