Iron Transfer Decals for Ceramics

We get asked a lot about how we do our iron transfer decals so we've put this introduction together.

You can buy the paper from http://fired-on.com/

We use an HP 1606d laser printer. That isn’t as important as the toner which is 78a. It’s the percentage of iron in the toner that is the key ingredient. Bubble jet, inkjet, and all color printers do NOT work because they don’t contain any or enough iron or other metallic oxides. I believe that all black HP laser printers work. If you want to know if a different laser printer will work you need to find the MSDS sheet for the toner and look at what the percentage for iron is (it may be called Ferrite or just Fe). You want it to be greater than 30%

We do our drawings either on our ipads or on paper, scan them into the computer and then touch them up in photoshop. We create full pages of images and then print them out on the decal paper. Applying them is easy. You cut out your image, soak it in water for a few seconds and then slide the transparent decal with your image on it off of the backing paper and apply it to your glaze fired piece of pottery. Using a soft rubber rib or just a towel you want to wipe all of the water away and make sure there are no bubbles under the decal. It’s a bit fussy at first but once you get the hang of it it’s a piece of cake. 

Firing the decals on perfectly takes a bit of experimentation to get it just right. Results can vary depending on the glazes and the clay body used. 

Decals being fired onto cone 6 glaze ware will usually be fired to about cones 05 or 04. We found this to be too cool for us so we fire to around cone 02. If you were firing decals onto a low fire clay you’d want to fire the decals to a couple of cones lower than your glaze firing. This is definitely something you need to test and experiment with. Too hot and your decals will be faded. Too cool and you’ll be able to feel them and when you wash your pot you’ll get iron washing off. 

Images show up best if they are high contrast. You can do photographs but to make them crisp and vivid you would want to adjust the contrast in your photo editing software. Of course colour images would need to be converted to b+w and then you’d adjust the contrast.