I received my March Calendar Girls postcard from CarolT a few days ago, and its brilliant. Carol had chosen the picture for March so I reckon she did have a bit of a head start on the rest of us and my only disappointment is that she didn’t include the chocs too. :)This is the photo for April, chosen by Susan. Yes, I know it has September on it, I’m not trying to confuse everyone – the idea was just to choose a calendar photo and not to worry about the month. To say this one has me flummoxed would be an understatement. Any hints on how to interpret this one would be gratefully received. Some of the Calendar Girls are already showing what they have created for this month and I am determined not to take a look just yet in case I feel the need to resort to plagiarism. *LOL*Amongst other things this week I have been playing with the JetFX Transfer paper from ArtVanGo. You won’t see anything wonderfully exciting here, just a few experiments to give me an idea of how I could use this technique in the future. This is the original image which I printed on to the JetFX paper.This image has been transferred on to silk noil.I ‘distressed’ this one before printing it by using water with a piece of wire wool. It was then printed on to Lutradur which had previously been sprayed with silk paints.I used a heat gun to zap it back. These are the close ups. It has been laid on a piece of black card to photograph it.I wanted to see if I could transfer a distressed image onto a foiled piece of Kunin Felt (I had visions of also zapping it back afterwards). I know the instructions say for light coloured fabric only but I thought that I would give it a try with the foiled background. Well, I tried a couple of times, but it just wouldn’t work. So I used a fusible webbing instead to foil a piece of Lutradur as before and tried transferring the image on top. Slightly better.And then I tried black Lutradur, but again, most of the detail is lost. So I zapped that as well!

I think I chose an image with too much detail in it. Maybe a bold pattern would work better. I’ll give that a try.
I kept all the offcuts of the paper as you can draw on these with different media and transfer the print to fabric.
These bits have been coloured with soft pastels which I blended with my finger. I like the fact that it didn’t transfer in one solid block. You can use wax crayons, oil pastels, charcoal etc. to colour your fabric first before transferring the image. Water soluble pastels & pencils can also be used on the fabric as a background. I used a copper printing block to take rubbings with wax crayons and oil pastels and transferred them to cotton fabric as well as Lutradur. I know I could get these images directly on the fabric one way or another but using the transfer paper heat sets the medium so it doesn’t smudge and is wash proof.
I’m still playing with the JetFX paper and also another product that Viv from ArtVanGo demonstrated – Transfer Solution.
I’m off to Atlantis on Saturday with Pat. Neither of us has been before, but judging by the photographs in their catalogue it is a massive warehouse full of art stuff. I shall take my ‘flexible friend’ with me but will still be limited to what I buy as I will have to carry it myself seeing as how my porter (aka DH) will be having a lovely day without me.

By the way, Ro Bruhn is having a very generous giveway on her blog this week - to celebrate a 'big' birthday. I suggest you pop over and leave a comment. I bought some papers from Ro's Etsy shop a while back and they are fantastic.