Foggy With a Chance of Ferrets

We’ve went through a whole box of Kleenex, two bags of Ricolas (cherry honey is my favorite) and at least two gallons of OJ this week at my house. My poor head has been in a fog. Nothing like a good head cold with flu-like symptoms to keep a girl from gearing up in full welding attire. I’ve had a wicked head cold with a flu chaser ALL WEEK. Arrrrgh. I finally felt up to working in the studio half day yesterday and worked on some fun fiber art projects using iron-on transfers. I’m smitten with transfers of any kind. Working in clay I loved experimenting with decals and found Keith Phillips decal work to be inspirational and Ang had some fun examples too. I’ve also had success with using Gel Transfer Medium with laser prints onto copper and metal, though it can be a bit tricky. I’ve bought and tried several varieties of iron-on transfers for fiber pieces but have not had any luck finding a product that worked in a laser printer. Most

transfers are made for the low heat of ink jet printers but are unable to retain the hi-resolution I like from my HP laser printer. I did find some Color Copier Transfer Paper by TrasnferMagic that was supposed to be able to run through color copiers. I printed my hi-res images out on my laser printer and took them to the Office Depot to run through one of their color copiers that was listed by TransferMagic as OK to use, but three of three attempts failed and all stuck or jammed on their fuser rollers! The TransferMagic product DID NOT WORK as was claimed and could have caused major damage

in all of the “approved” copiers we tried. The Office Depot store manager was so helpful and found a way to make hi-res ink-jet, iron-on transfer, color copies on an HP Photosmart All-in-One Premium Printer. He opened up a package of Office Depot iron-on ink-jet transfer paper and ran my hi-res laser copies through the display model HP ink-jet color copier and viola! Hi-res images that can be ironed on fabric. I’m going to do some fun appliqué wall art quilts using the printouts and now I can make as many as I want because I was so impressed with the ink-jet/color copier that I bought one!

OK, I wasn’t going to Blog about this but I just can’t help myself -and besides I did take a quick picture. While waiting in one of the customer chairs at the Carrs/Safeway Aurora Village pharmacy this week for a prescription to be filled, a line formed with other customers needing to pick up their medications. A guy standing right in front of me was FEEDING some sort of animal that had JUST CRAWLED OUT of the hood of his jacket! The guy was feeding a Ferret a nicely cubed piece of fresh cantaloupe that I know just had been picked with his grubby fingers from the salad bar. Half of us waiting at the pharmacy were completely grossed out but others were completely OK with this and wanting TO PET THE DAMN THING. Sorry, but what the hell, am I the only one that thinks this is so wrong?!

Mixed Results Using Ceramic Laser Toner Decals

Well, my decals didn't turn out quite as good as Cynthia's! Mistakenly, I originally set the kiln controller to Fast Glaze ^02, and in a panic, I had to stop the firing at about 800 degrees when I realized I meant to set the kiln to a fast glaze and at ^06. I think this had something to do with the majority of the images "lifting off" or looking like they got too hot beacuse the decals on the matte glaze pieces were very faint. All pieces were on the same shelf and the only items firing in the kiln. I am re-firing right now, slower and lower at a Slow Glaze Fire ^07... so we'll see. Linda Arbuckle's article has some possible trouble shooting solutions as well. "Laser-printed decals for ceramic use, by Linda Arbuckle, University of FL ceramics."

Getting back into clay, I wanted to see what the current trends and processes were. For me, reading any books, magazines, Blogs, publications etc. is my favorite vehicle for absorbing information, so I immersed myself in whatever I could get my hands on -the more non-traditional the clay process, the better. One of the books I checked out from the library that piqued my interest was "Image Transfer On Clay" by Andrew Wandless.

The use of transfers on clay interested me because in my past 20+ years as a graphic designer, I have an extensive library of "legal" copyright free images and original graphics. If I incorporated my designs into my clay work, I thought this may contribute to my work's originality. Combined with the good fortune of having the latest in graphic design software (Adobe CS3) and my MacBook Pro laptop, I feel good hardware and software helps to produce successful results using artful decals and transfers. First, 

I purchased a package of decal paper from Bel Decal paper on line. It arrived in a plain brown box from Florida with no real instructions, other than a reminder to remove the protective tissue before hand feeding the card stock into your laser printer. To be honest, I wasn't sure I even had ordered the right stuff! The most important piece of equipment, besides the decal paper, is using the right printer, or more specifically, the right toner, which has enough metal oxides to sustain in firing, and fortunately I have an old, large HP 4500 full color laser jet printer.

When I printed the decals I turned all of the images to black or grayscale in Photoshop and output only in black and not CM

YK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) because my printer is a full color printer. Cynthia recently purchased a very affordable HP p1006 laser printer in which the single black toner toner worked perfectly. Once you have filled a page with your designs and printed the page out, the application is pretty straight forward. Trim the paper close to the image, soak in warm water and slide onto your surface, blot dry and squeegee smooth. The peices I used were made using tile white clay bisque fired to ^04, matte and majolica glazes fast fired to ^05, then decal fired using fast glaze ^06 (which I think I goofed up). 

Here are some GREAT additional resources for using decals on ceramics: Justin Rothshank's Decalware, and Rothshank Artworks. On the Rothshank Artworks web site, click on the link pmirothshank.pdf for a great article printed in Pottery Making Illustrated March/April 2008 "Breaking the Rules -Pushing the Limits With Decals." There are vivid examples, resources, step-by-step 

instructions, applying to wood-fired ware and also how the decals work on unfired clay -which I didn't know you could do. Here is also a link to a Video from Ceramicsartsdaily.org with Justin applying decals and demonstrating the process.