11 Mar 2010

DIY Tote bags - first attempt!!

um, not exactly "DIY"-ing the tote itself, but the fact that i'm "decorating" it with my drawing, by both medium - hand drawn with fabric pens (not too successful, sob sob) and ironed on with transfer paper (slightly better results)

born the panda prototype!

pandas drawn by moi and gum with fabric pens. as u can see, we keep smudging the cloth n the blacks aren't "black enough" (oh n we were testing out 2 types of black pen too...so...not exactly pretty!)
fabric pens i got from vancouver & hk used on panda...none of them work well with my fingers :(
enhancing panda prototype & creating banana skin prototype with transfer paper <--slightly more managable, but still leaves some yucky yellow marks on the bag :((
added little details to panda


n so, by judging my own output quality, i say i still hv a looooooooooong way to go before i can go ahead n pursue my career plan c, which is to rely on selling pretty pretty bags n gds online and earn a living on it!! :P

plus need to find a way to lower the production cost...these transfer papers are expensive!!

10 comments:

alliot + iza said...

Fun!!! Keep on!

Karumen said...

cheers alliot!! ^^

bonne said...

its look great!

CA_grafico said...

You should try silk screening!

Karumen said...

ohoh silk screen...grafico that sounds vy professional! not sure if i can master it but surely sounds fun! let me explore ways to setting up a little workshop at home and give that a try! :D

Ren- Lady Of The Arts said...

I love your banana peels. I think they are cute and funny. Just found your blog and look forward to returning.

Karumen said...

Thanks Ren for dropping by! :D

helen said...

silk screening...sounds difficult. need to overlap the plates for different colors, right? seems not sth can be done at home? and needa do in quantity,too if outsource...

why not use a bigger sheet of transfer paper? so that the yellow patch covers the whole bag, then it wont look too weird...

or...stitch on the bag?

Karumen said...

um...helen, stitching was one of the ideas i had, but given my "thicker-than-normal" fingers, i'm sure i'll make a mess out of it. wahahahaha

n silk screening prob require quite a bit of space n sophistication too i also reckon.. :( perhaps like u said, a bigger transfer paper, either that or i cut the paper much closer to the pattern to min the yellowish zone @_@

Anz said...

These look great. Keep up the good work.

PS. You can do screen printing on a small scale. However I found the light sensitive chemicals used for the screens can be expensive and hard to get hold of. The whole process is a bit messy. Ideal for large quantities of the same design, but not one-offs.