Custom clothing labels for an actual client

I did these clothing labels recently. The challenge was printing fine-lined fonts onto a dark background. I had to thicken up the letters by adding a very small stroke to the letter fills. Also there wasn't much room with which to work.

Another challenge was that the photoprint fabric distorted the dark brown to a khaki green so I ended up having to use dark tee shirt transfer fabric, which is quite costly.

Custom clothing labels

Since I made my own sew-in clothing labels, I've been bidding on some custom jobs on Etsy. One potential client wanted Cherry blossoms and a script font. I created the flower brush in Adobe Illustrator 9.

Update: turns out the client wanted embroidered labels, she retendered the bid with more specifics.

Low Cost Clothing Brand Name Labels

Hang tags are those tags that are on the back of your shirt. Correction: they are actually known as "labels". When they stick up, they are also known as "loser tags." :) Here's my method for making some low cost ones that look good. (My weekend was spent trying to stamp with acrylic paint onto ribbon, but that ended up looking messy.)

Using paper-backed fabric for use with inkjet printers - I used a Canon Pixma printer with archival quality ink - simply print out a page with your shop name or logo on it. I used Adobe Illustrator, but there's no reason you couldn't do this also in your word processor.I made some hang tags that were about 1.5"x1.5" square, with 1/4" space at the top for the seam allowance, then the logo, then the rest was for the fold-under/remaining seam allowance. I fold them once over then sew them into the seam. My only cost was my time and the photofabric paper. I ironed the labels to set the ink.

Update: I did a washing test of my labels in hot water, and the pink color faded a bit, but the black stayed true. My takeaway is that some colors work better than others for colorfastness with this technique. If one wants hot water colorfastness, then likely a fixative spray such as plasti-dip could be used. (I'm sure there's others, its just that I have Plasti-dip on hand).

my3littlemonkeys says:
Hi I use those on my baby slings. I don't bother turning over I just zigzag all the way around. You can also trim to the right size and apply fray stop to your edges.( put some on a plastic lid and just dip the sides)