Transferring a design

I have an embroidery design printed on regular paper. How do I transfer this to the canvas book cover so I can begin to hand embroider? Like so many things in life, you need the right supplies to do the job.

The first step is to procure some transfer paper. Because my fabric is dark, I need this transfer paper to be light or else the design will not be clearly marked on the fabric. There are several companies that make transfer paper, Saral, Dritz and DMC among them. I chose the Saral paper, mostly because the sampler pack contained a white sheet, and because the size of the paper was large at 8.5" X 11". All of these are wax-free, which means that you can iron over them without permanently setting the pigment into the fabric. Not that it matters in this case.

I lined up the transfer paper with the print-out of my embroidery design, making sure that the pigment side of the transfer paper is down so that it will be in contact with the fabric. It's a bit difficult to see the difference between the design paper and the transfer paper in the photo because both are white. Other colors of transfer pigment exist - yellow, red, blue, graphite - but they aren't as suitable for this project. I fussed with the orientation of the design on the book cover... I had decided that I had drawn it a bit askew so I corrected for that by placing the design slightly on the diagonal. This causes the pomegranate to recline a bit and rotates the butterfly in ascension.

Once the design paper, tracing paper and canvas book cover were lined up in the position I wanted them, I pinned everything into place so it couldn't shift. I then traced over the design on the paper with a sharp pencil. Every now and then I would lift the corners of the tracing paper so that I could make certain I hadn't missed any lines. When I had gone over the design entirely I removed the pins. At this point the design was accurately transferred to the fabric, but it was a bit powdery, and it was easy to brush off. It certainly wouldn't stand up to a month or more in my embroidery bag, or the passage of my hands over the fabric as I embroider.

I needed to make the markings more durable. It was time to whip out the second transfer tool - the transfer pencil. Unlike the transfer paper, the pencil contains wax. This means that if you iron over the pencil marks they will likely become permanent. On the other hand, the pencil marks are removable with cold water as long as you don't iron over it. Making sure the pencil was sharp, I traced over the powdery lines left by the transfer paper. The resulting lines are less sharp, but more durable. The photo below shows the design half-way through the pencil tracing process. You can see that the flower, now traced in pencil, is more blurry than the pomegranate or butterfly. But while the lines are less distinct they are still a good reference for embroidery. Nonetheless it is clear that I will need to keep my paper line drawing on hand if I really want to precisely adhere to my original concept.

Finally the design was fully traced. It was time to load the canvas into the embroidery frame. I am using a frame for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is too extensive a design for me to rely on keeping good tension while embroidering "in hand". That's just me - there are plenty of experienced embroiderers out in the world who are fully capable of embroidering this "in hand" without getting any puckering. But not me! Second, this is not a fast project, and the more I handle the canvas the dimmer the markings will become. By giving myself a frame to grab I don't need to handle the embroidery area as much and the markings will stay distinct longer.

I'm not entirely happy with the tension through the middle section of the canvas - the vertical pinch bars cannot get a good grip on the center portion because the screw bars on top are causing them to bow out in the middle. I think I can solve this problem by lacing some thread through the very edge of the canvas on the center of the side and tying it tautly to the frame. I haven't done that yet, but other than this slight adjustment, the book cover is now traced off and loaded into the embroidery frame and ready for embroidery.

Now that I've done this, I've realized that I probably want to put the appliqué center of the pomegranate on the canvas before I start hand embroidery, ha ha! Oh well. I'll cover that part of the project next, I guess.