To Fabric-Medium or Not to Fabric Medium?

Our local Michaels decided that rather than have folk create detailed costumes to a theme such as Alice in Wonderland (2013) or The (Steampunk) Wizard of Oz, we would focus our 2017 Halloween effort on something simple: Emoji T-shirts. This follows on the popularity of emojis: last month, we had a very popular "Emoji Cupcake" class, and Emoji versions 5.0 through 5.2 have been making their way into mobile devices and computer operating systems throughout the summer and fall.

Most of our T-shirt decorating events — we had two this month — tend to have a strong painting component to it. Mostly, we use regular craft acrylic paints such as the CraftSmart paints we sell for about $0.70 per two-ounce bottle, with nothing added. Since most of our T-shirts are wear-once items, the cardboard feel of painted cloth and the durability of the design is not an issue — but for those with a longer expected lifespan, there are techniques for making the painted fabric more flexible and, well, washable. These involve using more expensive paints designed for use on fabric, adding "fabric medium" to regular acrylic paints, and/or heat-setting the painted designs.

[A side note for those of us who are not avid painters: "mediums" are materials added into acrylic paints to change their texture, appearance, and properties. "Gloss" mediums make paints glossy; "matte" mediums remove their shine; "slow-dry" mediums extend a paint's drying time; "crackle" mediums give the finished item a cracked and aged appearance.]

For the most part, I've not had success with fabric medium. Then again, it wasn't until reading the instructions on the fabric mediums we sell that I learned I needed to heat set the painted fabric to activate its effects. While I remain skeptical about the flexibility of craft-project paint (as opposed to professional silkscreen-printing fabric paint), I was (largely) diligent about adding it to the three T-shirts I created for our Halloween dress-up. (FWIW, I did two different fake emojis — a portmanteau of "Star Struck" and "Person With Headscarf", and a World Diabetes Day version of "Face With Open Mouth and Cold Sweat" — and a T-shirt version of our mobile app just for fun.) The portmanteauji made it through the wash with little damage, but my Michaels app cracked and lost much of its top paint layer, despite the using fabric medium according to package directions, and some of the dimensional fabric paint stuck to itself and had to be peeled off. (That said, the areas that felt most like cardboard before washing came out less stiff and minimally damaged. They were also the areas that were heat treated almost to the point of burning.)

Portmanteauji Detail -
after washing
(heat-treated)

App Shirt Detail:
White-on-Red cracking, paint loss
after washing

Dimensional Paint damage
after washing

Gray-over-White and Red-on-White
paint loss (non-heat-set)
Dark Red over Red consistency
(heat-set) after washing

While I'm debating whether or not to touch up the failed parts of that T-shirt, I'm very much wondering about how one's choices of paints, fabric medium, and proportions of one to the other affect a T-shirt project that one might actually want to have a life beyond the washing machine. I'm in the process of gathering materials to do a "sampler" T-shirt that should (hopefully) give me some answers.