Iron-on vinyl is making things possible that just aren’t with the freezer paper, mostly because it has a backing. This holds the ‘floating bits’ of more intricate designs in the position they are supposed to be, so you don’t get the distortions you get from flimsy paper, especially once you have cut multiple holes into it. With vinyl the edges are absolutely sharp too, no leaking here and there. I am mostly able to touch this up, but it can still be a problem in some instances. The vinyl works particularly well with the abstract art I’m into at the moment, which is more intricate than the Marimekko type stuff.
It has taken me this long to get enthusiastic about the vinyl because I had some bad experiences with the shiny kind, that just made the result look cheap.
But the matt kind is lovely and I have been playing with that with great results. It doesn’t have the colour graduations of the original art work, but it’s still pretty good.
The vinyl also works in combination with using freezer paper for the simpler parts of the art work, and then the vinyl over the top like this tee below. It is my interpretation of a Franck Vidal painting, almost the same but not quite.
As always, there are horses for courses. The vinyl is good for intricate lines and small areas of colour, but not for overall colouring of a garment. Why not? Because it does leave a coating, not enough to make the garment uncomfortable in small doses, but a total cover would be like wearing plastic.
The other limitation is that the vinyl is opaque and there are no colour graduations. Not like the luminous colours and subtle blending of hues when working with dyes.
So even though the dyes are so much more of a headache to work with, they still have their place.