Continuing the series Printing on Fabric 101. Last week we looked at printers and printer inks; today I’ll discuss a bit about fabrics.
You can print on just about any type or color of fabric so long as it’s properly prepared and backed with a paper carrier so it feeds through your printer easily and without jamming. For washable prints, you need to make sure you use specially treated fabric, and for water-resistant prints you can use special printer inks. However there are also a few other considerations to think about in relation to the type of fabric you choose …
Pre-washing Your Fabric
A good rule-of-thumb is, if you are using your printed images in an item that will be washed, it’s always a good idea to pre-wash your fabric in order to pre-shrink it before you print on it. If it’s something that will never be washed, then you have the choice of pre-washing or not. Pre-washing also helps to remove any surface treatment that might be applied to the fabric at the manufacturing stage, such as sizing, and this ensures that the ink has a very receptive surface.
Surface Texture
The surface texture of your fabric also will determine the results of your printed image. If you want fine detail to show up, choose a fabric that has a tight weave and a smooth surface. Prepared for dye (pfd) fabric is a good choice when printing fine detail, plus this type of fabric also has the advantage of being free of starches, sizing or other surface finishes so your print will have nice crisp detail and vivid color. Fabrics that have more open weaves such as muslin, are suitable for prints where fine detail is not required.
Fabric Color
Printing on fabric that is pure white will give you the most “true-to-life” color results, while printing on fabric that is off-white or natural in color can result in colors that are kind of muddy-looking. Similarly, printing on colored fabric will result in colors that are not “true-to-life”. This is because printer inks are transparent.
In these samples you can see that printing one color ink over the top of another color ink in fact changes the colors, similar to what happens when you mix paint colors.
But colored fabric can also offer unexpected and often beautiful results depending on the type of image you’re printing, such as the image of this woman that was printed onto a pale orange hand-dyed fabric.
Printing the Color White
Most printers will not print the color white. Generally what happens is, if there is a white section on your image the printer simply won’t print any color at all. This is ok if you’re printing on white, but if you’re printing on colored fabric the results can be a bit of a surprise.
The solution is to change the areas of white color on your image to a light gray or cream color. This can be done using photo editing software such as photoshop elements or similar programs. While your printer won’t print white, it will print every other color.
In the samples below you can see that on a cream colored muslin the tips of the petals appear to be quite white, and even on the colored fabric although not perfectly white, it gives the illusion of white which is better than printing no color at all which would result in petals the same color of the fabric.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of articles. If you missed out on some of the articles, you can find them all listed here.
Resources
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If you’ve been following along, I’m currently doing a review of all the cool new stuff in the latest version 9 of Photoshop Elements. If you haven’t yet tried Photoshop Elements 9, Adobe offers a free 30 day trial. You can download it here. 
During the next few weeks I’ll be showing you some of the great new features that are available in the latest version of Photoshop Elements which is version 9. If you haven’t yet tried Photoshop Elements 9 and you want to follow along, Adobe offers a free 30 day trial. 
Textured and decorative framed edges for your photos, can really set the mood and turn your photos and images into something memorable, don’t you think?
