Plastic Decals and Knitting

Yesterday in a popular Bulgarian crafting forum I came upon this amazing blog and the ingenious idea for iron on decals from plastic bags.
As everybody else, I have some old and rather simple cotton T-shirts at home that could benefit from a decal. So I took out three tops, that are still in circulation and one I had allocated for the recycle bin, for the initial experiments,

and an assortment of plastic bags:

The first tries were a failure - the plastic cuttings stuck to the parchment paper, then to the xerox paper. I read the comments under the blog post and there were other people with my problem too, and the people who had done the transfer successfully claimed that they used American parchment paper. Then it occurred to me that my new roll of baking paper was actually different from the previous rolls I've used - it is brown and not so transparent. So, I found a small piece from the old roll - white and semi-transparent and voila - the transfer was a success!

The transfers on the grey 100% T-shirt, using cuttings from LDPE 04 bag were OK -

On this photo the settings of my iron are No steam and Max temp, but further I lowered the temp a bit to Cotton settings.

Then I tried to transfer a flower cutting from the thinner bag to a 95% cotton and 5% elastic top - total fiasco :(

All my further tries were failures - thinner plastics shriveled and deformed and thicker plastics fell of the elastic textiles (I tried 95% cotton and 5% lycra and 100% corded cotton).

In conclusion - I don't consider my experiment a success, but I wanted to share it with you, if you are interested to try it yourself.

And a glimpse to my current knitting project - a self-designed summer sweater with 3/4 sleeves. This is the texture I came up with:

So far I've got the front and half of the back - slowly, but steadily it keeps my hands busy :)