PHOTO TRANSFER USING A INK JET PRINTER / NO SMEARING / NO RUBBING / AMAZING RESULTS

Hello YouTube friends and welcome to my channel. My name is Deidre from Our Upcycled Life. Today I'm going to show you how you can do photo transfer or graphic transfer using your ink jet. It can be very tricky sometimes. The ink runs and smears really easy and it can be really frustrating but I've mastered a technique of how you can do it and have really good success. So let's get started. I'm going to do this technique on a frame that I picked up at the thrift store. I've distressed the frame. I use the candle wax technique to distress this. If you've never tried that out it's a really simple easy way to take a frame and make it look old and chippy and vintage. I'll put the link below in the description so you can check that out. But I'm going to take out the middle part and that's what we're going to do the transfer on. And to do this you're going to need some address label sheets or these are these CD label sheets. I always find them at the thrift store. They're really reasonable but what you want is you want the carrier sheet to print on. You want to use this one and then peel off the labels and you want that shiny sheet that's underneath. And I don't like to waste these. I'm going to show you what I'm going to do with those before we start. I have a sheet of scrapbooking paper and I'm going to take these labels and I'm going to put them on the back side and then it's going to take that scrapbook paper make it a little bit thicker and they make fantastic gift tags. And there you have perfect little hang tags to use on your gifts and you haven't wasted the labels. Okay so here's the carrier sheet and the next step we want to work on the shiny side of this sheet. And what we're going to do next is you're going to take your mat or gloss, but I prefer to use the mat, and you're going to put a coat all over the shiny side of that paper. And you want to take it right to the ends and you try and get it as even as you can. You don't want it lumpy in some spots and thinner in others. You want to coat it really well and you'll notice that it might bubble up a little bit but that's okay. It'll all work in the end. We're just going to cover it completely. I probably should have put something under my work area here but that's not how I roll. I do everything the hard way so I have a mess to clean up after. Okay so we're going to let that sit and dry completely. Okay that first coat has dried really well and now we're going to go on and put on an even thicker coat. You want it really quite thick because you're trying to make a skin on that carrier sheet. So I'm going to put it on really thick and then I'm going to take a credit card or an old card once I get this on really thick and I'm going to smooth it out. So then I'm just going to take the card and because you don't want any lumps or you just want a nice smooth surface so you're just going to take the card and just run it along and make sure you don't have any brush marks and then we're going to let that sit and completely dry. Okay this is completely dry and this is key to this type of transfer. It has to be completely dry. If you try to put this through your printer when it's still wet you are going to gum up your printer and you're going to wreck it. So make sure it's really really dry. You also want to make sure that you have it covered enough so you don't have any of that glossy paper showing through. It has to be quite a thick coat of Mod Podge on this carrier paper. Now we're ready to put it in the printer. You want to make sure that you're loading your paper in the right way so it prints on that Mod Podge. So you're just going to load it into your inkjet and get ready to print. So we're just going to let this sit and dry for a few minutes. You want the ink not to rub off and it's still a bit damp so we're just going to let it dry really well. Okay so the picture that I printed out was just from one of our camping trips. My husband and I like to do lots of adventures so I always have lots of photos and I love to frame them but here comes the magic part. This just peels right off of that carrier sheet. How cool is that? And then you have your photo that you can put onto your project. Now the one thing that you should think about is this is see-through so whatever is in the background is going to show through your photo so if you have this painted with a dark color it's not going to look as nice with your photos but this looks really nice on the black on the white background. So now all I'm going to do is I'm just going to trim the edges. Now we're ready to attach this to our project. The way that I like to do it the best is to put a light coat of the Mod Podge on the piece of wood and then apply the photo on top of that. I've got it all covered with Mod Podge and I'm just going to center my photo exactly in the middle and then press it right down. Now you can leave it as this and just make sure you press it down really really well but I like to do another step just to ensure that it's going to stick really well. I like to take a piece of parchment paper and then I've got my iron set on high with no steam and I just like to run it across just to melt some of that Mod Podge just a little bit and then make it adhere really well to the wood. You don't need very much. I just gave it a really light iron, let it cool down, took the parchment paper off and I have a fantastic inkjet transfer photo and you can even take it one step further if you want. This already now has obviously the Mod Podge right on the top, it has a top coat but you can also seal it a little bit more with your polyacrylic water-based sealer in satin if you think you want to have a little bit more of a coverage on your picture. I'm just going to take a little bit of the polyacrylic and just go right over the top, no bubbles, no wrinkles, sealed in beautifully onto that wood with an inkjet. You don't need to worry about any running or smearing, this transfer technique is game changer. So all of my YouTube friends that don't have a laser jet printer and struggle to do photo and graphic transfers, you need to try this out. If you enjoyed this video make sure you leave me a thumbs up and if you like this video you'll probably like this one. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video.