Preen – the experiments continue

My Preen Inspired shorts are finished! The style is not inspired by Preen – I don’t think they do a range of running shorts, although the duo design for Debenhams. And my fabric design is somewhat constrained by the cottage-industry approach of my production line. But I am thrilled to bits to be able to run around with my own peony photos on my pants. The colours are really vibrant.

The shorts are lovely. But another of my experiments was not so nice. I used polycotton and the heat transfer inks which had been so successful with my Sewathon T-shirt. For this I had used a polyester jersey and had had stunning results. The colours were bright and the colour effects were better than I had hoped for.

I thought the polyester-cotton blend would be equally wonderful, but sadly not. I prepared the paper by producing a two-inch square grid, then coloured in each square with watered down transfer inks. I used the heat press to apply the ink to the polycotton. Unfortunately the brush strokes were evident, but not in a good way, and the colours were more muted. A disappointing result on the same night England lost to Uruguay.

I also made some T-shirts with iron on transfers that I printed at Mary Ward Centre. Here I used the same set of photos of pixellated peonies but ran them off on the photocopier. The printing ink and a layer of shiny adhesive is also applied, this time to cotton fabric. It’s not the best effect ever, with a little bit of puckering and a high gloss finish. I wore one for yoga with my purple leggings and it looked nice and performed well.

My shorts pattern is developing well (this is the third iteration) – I have one or two developments left to work through!