Mask with printable fabric

So, yes, I’m still sewing masks. I had finished those for my extended family when my daughter let me know her boyfriend didn’t have one. We talked over some ideas, and because she’s a TOTAL goofball we wanted to do something fun. He’s been growing a beard during this stay-at-home time so we decided to go with that. HTV was my first thought, but it’s not a good choice because it’s not breathable. I had done some other masks with applique, but I’m very much an amateur with that and I didn’t think it would work great on this project. I hunted around in my craft supplies stash and found some printable fabric. I’m going to show you how I created the design to print on that fabric. I’ll go over some beginning steps to tracing and using the fill patterns to add interest.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click the link and purchase something, I may receive a small commission. You pay the same price. This helps me to be able to keep my business going and provide more tutorials.

What is printable fabric?

Printable fabric is a rectangle of 100% cotton fabric with a piece of paper adhered to it. That makes it stiff enough to go through a printer. It is the size of a regular piece of paper (8 1/2″ x 11″) and works with inkjet printers. This (paid link) is what I used. Technically, it says you can only dry clean the fabric once printed. I did it anyway. I figured it was worth a try, especially since I’d had it for years. To keep it colorfast, after printing I ironed it at a high temperature. Then I used Retayne (paid link), which is a color fixative for fabrics. I had that on hand for quilting. I soaked it in that, rinsed with color water, then used a hot iron to dry it. Even if the printable fabric doesn’t hold the color long-term, it will make my daughter and her boyfriend laugh.

This (paid link) printable fabric is labeled as colorfast when washed. On this one, they recommend basically the same thing — using heat to set the ink. The washing instructions say to wash by hand or on the gentle cycle in a washing machine in cold water without detergent. Well, that doesn’t sound any more colorfast to me. So I figured it wasn’t worth investing in a new pack of printable fabric (especially since the first pack has been in a drawer for years).

Are there other options?

Yes, there are a few other things you can try instead of the printable fabric. Here are some ideas.

• Silhouette has a printable fabric material. Again, this is for inkjet printers. I’m not sure of the washing or colorfast info on that, as I don’t have a pack.
• Some folks have been using sublimation. I’m not sure that’s a great idea, since the fabrics you use are all polyester.
• As I said, do NOT use HTV, unless it’s only on the sides. It should not cover the nose or mouth at all.
• Fabric ink is another choice, as long as you don’t saturate the fabric too much. You can use the stencil vinyl for this.
• You could try a silkscreen as well. As with fabric ink, don’t overdo it and keep it away from the nose and mouth areas.
• Fabric markers (paid link) would be a great option.  You can trying putting them in the machine to sketch the design by using the pen holder. Or, use a sketch pen or your own pen in the pen holder to have the machine draw the outlines of the design on the fabric. That gives you a great guide for coloring in. How fun would that be to do with kids? The sketch pens might even work for a permanent color, but I haven’t tried that.

Creating the design

I didn’t cut anything — I just used the Silhouette Studio software to design the beard and then printed from there. That’s because I’m just starting with a rectangular mask piece so it wasn’t worth my time. You could cut the fabric if you choose, such as if you are doing the Olson style masks.

Setting up the page

I used an 8 1/2″ x 11″ page size and changed the orientation to landscape, as that is how my mask piece is.

I started by drawing a rectangle the size of the mask I needed — 8″ x 10″. If I print that I know right where to cut, so I raised the line thickness to 1.0. Any time you raise a line thickness, that line will print.

I then created an internal offset of .375″ for the 3/8″ seam allowance. This is just for visual reference, so I left it at the default 0.0 line thickness. I changed the line style to a dotted line.

Getting an image

The Silhouette Design Store has some beards, but none with the look I wanted. For this project, I wanted a design with internal pieces (holes). I found a clip art image of a beard. I am NOT going to sell this mask, so it’s not a problem to use it. If you are going to sell anything you make, you MUST design it yourself or have a commercial license for it.

Find a design and save it on your computer. The easiest type of image to work with is one that is pure black and white, because we’re going to trace it. That’s all I’m going to cover in this lesson — a very basic trace. Then use File>Merge to add it to the page you’ve set up. Here’s mine on my Design area.

Now, technically I could just resize this and print it. But I wanted color, not just black and white. So, I did a simple trace in order to recolor the image. Tracing is the process of creating vectors (cut lines) from raster images.

Drawing the trace box

I recommend keeping your image at the size it opens to do a trace. Because it’s a raster image, it’s likely to get distorted if I make it larger and therefore wouldn’t be as clean on the trace.

To do a trace, you’ll open the Trace panel from the right side icon bar. Then click “Select Trace Area.” You’ll see that your cursor changes to what looks like crosshairs, which is always the indication that you’re going to click and drag to create something. Put that cursor above and to the left of your image. Then click and drag around it.

You’ll see a gray box now around the image. Make sure it’s past the outer edges on all sides. You’ll also see some yellow covering your design. What that’s showing you is where the cut lines would be created. Remember — I’m not cutting this. But I do want it to be a vector image so that I can manipulate it. If I completed the trace right now and then sent the beard to cut, what I’d have would be a cut image in the exact shape of what I see in yellow.

Adjusting the threshold

Notice that there are parts of the image that aren’t covered in yellow. That’s because I need to adjust one of the filters — threshold. Silhouette Studio doesn’t actually read colors. It reads light values because each color has a specific spot on the light spectrum. By adjusting the threshold, we tell the software what light values in the image we want to grab.

The default setting for threshold is 45. If we take it all the way down to 0, it will only pick up the blackest of blacks. As we move it up, it begins to pick up lighter and lighter colors. Even through my image looks like it’s all just black and white, there are really some grays in it. So by moving the threshold up I get more of the image. I want to raise it until it picks up more of the beard, but not so much that it begins to get the subtle grays in the background. It works for me at around 76.

Performing the trace

At this point I click “Trace” at the bottom of the panel. The gray box and yellow fills go away, and it may look like nothing happened. But if you move your raster image out of the way, you’ll see the cut lines the software created. I recommend you always fill the trace with color right away so you can see what it would look like if cut.

Recoloring the image

I filled the beard with color. I could go right from here. But it looks a little flat so I want more interest.

First, I open my fill panel and go to the 3rd tab for patterns. I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the preloaded patterns and picked the last one called “Yellowmarble.” See how much more interesting it is already?

I’m going to go a step further by using some varying shades of this fill pattern. First, I made 2 copies of the image and opened the Image Effect panel. On one, I raised the brightness level, then on the second I lowered it. That gives me the same basic fill, but in varying shades.

Let me warn you at this point. We now have a good deal of raster information, which can be hard for the software to process depending on your computer. If you have trouble with that, try working with just one beard at a time on your page for the next steps.

Release the compound path.

Choose one of your images to be your base — the one that’s closest to what you want as your main color. I’m going with that one on the left.

On one of your other images, you want to release the compound path. What that will do is separate all the pieces, as if they had been grouped together. I’ve done that here on my lighter beard. See all those little bounding boxes? I now have many separate pieces.

Now if I move the large piece out of the way, you can see them all more clearly.

I did the same on the darker beard as well.

Move the bits around

Here’s the fun and time-consuming part, depending on your computer, design and how you want it to look. I moved the bits from the lighter and darker beards over the base beard. That gave me variations in the tone of the beard, more like real hair.

Again, this can all take processing time depending on your computer.

Grouping and sizing

Once I had all the bits in place, I grouped everything together and resized it to fit my rectangle. The image was taller than the rectangle, so I used Subtract to chop off the top. That’s not totally necessary, as the printer wouldn’t go past the printable area anyway.

Printing on the printable fabric

I loaded my printable fabric into my printer and sent it to print. I just used a medium quality and a thick plain paper setting. That will depend on your individual computer. Here’s my piece printed. I’ve already cut along the black line to make it the size I need for my mask, and I’ve removed the backing paper.

After that, I soaked it in the Retayne, rinsed it and dried it by ironing on a high heat.

Now if you wanted to do this as a print and cut, you could. Let’s say I was making the Olson style mask instead of the surgical style. You could do it in the same way, just printing the lines of the pattern pieces along with the design. Or, you could do it as a print and cut if you want your machine to cut the fabric. As I said, I found that to be more time than it was worth taking. Plus, you’d have to do more work in the designing phase to account for the seam allowances, depending on your design. For mine, that would take a pretty good amount.

If you’re just using one of the pen options, you only need to have the machine draw the outlines for you, then you can add your own coloring.

The finished mask

Here’s the mask all sewn together.

That’s my goofy daughter and an obliging deer skull in her boyfriend’s apartment modeling it for me. In hindsight, I probably should have made the mustache portion smaller/less wide. But I hope this has given you at least some ideas about how to design more interesting print projects.