Print Kid Drawings On Fabric, step by step

Okay, okay – so we are taking a breather from our usual kitchen-related reader redesigns to share a especially cool project on a smaller scale. Well, if you call a project that involves 120 hand-drawn monsters a “small” undertaking. Now I have got your curiosity piqued, eh? I will let Jen explain:

My son Daniel is a prolific artist and I hoped to showcase some of his sketches and chose that I would do so on a duvet cover. He designs his own Pokemon, complete wtih names, types, and evolutions and he chose those for the project. Here are his design sheets:

I photographed each chosen design. Then in Photoshop I erased all extra marks around the edge, used the Hue / Saturation tool to effectively bleach out all colour, converted it to grayscale and increased brightness and contrast to get a pleasant, pure black & white image to trace. Then I resized each chosen character to fit on a sheet of paper and printed them out.

I chose the first image to trace, put it on a piece of cardboard and slid it into the top left corner of the duvet cover. Then I began tracing it with the fabric marker.

This is after about four and half hours of tracing:

Preparing the images took around 2-3 hours (I did not take note of the time) and the actual tracing took around 8 hours. I did not do it all in one go but worked on it as and when I had time, packing it away in between tracing sessions. And here is the final product, which I am so glad about – and thankfully Daniel likes it too! – Jen

Now c’mon, how cool is that? Daniel not only gets to sleep among his (quite inventive!) creations every night, but also gets this daily reminder of how dedicated his mom is to celebrating his imagination. You can check out Jen’s journal for more pics and info on the process, like whether or not it survived the wash (spoiler alert: it did!). Perhaps we will make Clara one of these someday. And even if kid doodles are not your design of choice, I can see this method working to transfer a large handwritten enjoy letter or something. So cool.

Psst- We announced this week’s giveaway winner. Click here to see if it is you.