Printed Fabric Appliques with Sprout by HP®

This post is sponsored by HP® Sprout

I’ll admit: fabric appliques do bring about visions of those sweatshirts, popular in the 90s, with fabric bubble letters and shapes depicting everything from high school names and mascots to snowmen. Wait a minute… am I the only one who had those? If you can’t tell, I owned some VERY cool clothes once upon a time. Anyway, appliques might sound kitschy but, with the Sprout by HP®, they can be fresh and beautiful.

As I said last week, the Sprout is this whole new system that combines physical creation with digital. It has the ease of digital manipulation with a bit of hands-on-ness too (with the touch-screen and Touch Mat), which, as a hands-on person, I like. Almost immediately after unpacking the Sprout, I thought of the printed fabric pouches I shared back in February as part of a Zipper Pouch Series. This system would have been perfect so I decided to use it to make more printed fabric.

The Sprout can capture anything you’d like, turning a 3-D object into a 2-D image you can then further manipulate. Our system now has an extensive collection of plastic animal figurine images thanks to Sweet J. Haha! I chose springy tulips for my printed fabric.

I created my fabric appliques by first capturing the images of a handful of real tulips with the 3-D camera and Touch Mat. I actually did the capturing late in the evening in my dark office. I was a bit mesmerized by the images on the screen. So beautiful and detailed.

From there, I spent time making a few arrangements. I wasn’t sure how I was going to use the printed fabric and the arrangements were in case I decided to use them all together. Arranging them digitally is so easy and encourages lots of tweaking. With a flick or pinch of the finger, images can be moved, resized and placed.

Once I liked the layout, I saved them as JPEGs and PDFs (again, super easy).

I used the PDFs to print on basic white cotton fabric following the steps of this printed fabric tutorial. It’s still really cool, in my opinion, to print an image onto fabric. Nerd–>me

I decided I wanted to use the tulips on a zippered pouch, I thought Love Bug would adore it. Before sewing it up, I first connected the printed fabric to the iron-on adhesive (like Heat’n Bond) and then cut out the individual tulips. Since I had already made arrangements I liked, laying them out the fabric was easy. I peeled off the iron-on adhesive paper backing and ironed them in place.

I sewed around the tulip shapes to really hold them in place. Plus, I like the look of the stitched edges.

Then I used the zippered pouch tutorial to finish the pouch. I also used the tulips on a plain flour sack towel, as seen in the third image above. The simplicity of this object-to-PDF process has me thinking about more printed fabric variations. Plus, I should probably use all those animals images on something. :)

This post is sponsored by HP. All opinions and ideas are my own. Thank you for being supportive of our sponsors.