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Handmade Packaging: DIY Laundry Instruction Tags for Hand-painted Textile Products

I have a little project to share with you, it basically brings together two of the things I love: Illustration and packaging. If you are making hand-painted fabric totes, scarves, tablecloths, etc, using fabric paints, then I hope you will like this idea.

A while back I started painting on fabric, using permanent fabric paints and colors. If you have experience with fabric paint, then you must know that to fix the colors you mostly need to iron your finished product on”cotton setting” to make the artwork permanent. But there are products that only need to be air-dried for at least 72 hours before going to the washing machine on a gentle-cycle, and on a certain, usually low, temperature.

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As I mixed brands and worked with more than one “instructions booklet,” I felt the need to merge the instructions from the different fabric-paint brands in a way to make all the products I worked with laundry-friendly. I decided to choose the instructions that recommended the lowest heat-setting, the lowest washing-machine temperature, and I decided maybe it was best if I recommended all pieces be ironed on reverse, since that was the safest method for some fabric-paint labels, and no tumble dry.

This is the basic illustration I came up with for most of my products. There are items though, that required to be washed by hand. This meant the washing-machine illustration had to go, and another symbol was sketched instead. I did play with this photo (above) a bit and added the colors with Photoshop, but one can achieve a clean colorful illustration by applying acrylic paint with a thin brush.

This is the colorless illustration. I basically used cards that are about the size of a regular business card. The paper has a lot of grain and the color is off-white and very nice to work with.

Here’s a label using old markers. I embellished the tag’s borders a bit, but I decided later on that this wasn’t necessary. You can punch a hole at the side of the tag, insert a nice thread or twine, and use a pin or tape to attach it to the product itself, or to the packaging.