Name: Joni

Message: My daughter's preschool class pounded leaves into fabric and got leaf prints on squares of muslin.  I don't think they pretreated the fabric at all.  I would like to make a wall hanging for the teacher and I want to know if it's possible to fix the color before sewing it.

Thanks for any insights you might be able to share.

The best way to make a hanging of the original fabric would be to frame it behind glass, in order to protect the design from damage due to moisture and the oxygen in the air, and to reduce the damaging effects of light. Don't ever launder these fabric squares, because the designs will mostly wash out. There is no way to use the green color from pounded leaves as a permanent dye. 

You could use fabric paint or fabric markers to paint over the designs to make them permanent, but you would risk changing the designs that the kids made. Using fabric paint or fabric markers, to make pounded leaf designs permanent, is best done by the original artist. You could minimize the changes by painting over the designs with a colorless clear fabric paint extender, such as Neopaque colorless extender, which would help to protect the images as close to their current state as possible. 

A better choice would be to have the images color-copied and printed onto fabric, either at your local copy shop, or by scanning the images in yourself onto your computer. After scanning them in, you can print onto a specially prepared fabric that accepts computer printer ink, or you could print them onto inkjet transfer paper, and use a hot dry iron to transfer the images onto cotton fabric. The new permanent-image fabric squares can then be sewn together like a quilt top and bordered with additional fabric. You could hang it from a quilt hanger, or you could stretch it over the wooden stretcher bars used by oil painters for their canvases to make an easy-to-hang professional-looking display.

For more details on leaf-pounded images, see my page, "How can I set the dye from pounding flowers onto cloth?", from the FAQ section of this website.

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