“I’m not sure if I’ll embellish this art bag.”
Of course I was going to embellish it!
Plus I found a fabulous way to use up my old broken jewelry.
I really love the way it turned out. What do you think?
What Was I Thinking?
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Tag Archives: Inkjet Printing on Fabric
Printing on Fabric 101: Fabric Options
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.
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New Work: Reminisce
I’ve just finished a new art bag using one of my latest digital art designs called “Reminisce”. Isn’t she pretty? I can’t wait to take her out on my next shopping trip. And yes! I do actually use my art bags because they’re not only beautiful, but they’re designed to be functional as well. I particularly love the design and colors of “Reminisce” and named the design because it reminded me of my grandmother – all lacy and lavender, and of course she loved her garden and her flowers.
I usually add some beaded embellishment to the front of my art bags but I’m not sure if I’ll do that to this one; I think I’ll live with it for a few days to see how I feel. And as usual, the design was printed on fabric using my very favorite digital grounds, so it has beautiful depth of color, texture and detail.
Another Use for Injured Prints
or How I Made a Mousepad in 5 Minutes
I’ve been threatening to make a new mouse pad for quite a while, but of course my “to do” list gets longer every day and it wasn’t a priority up until the other day when I finally couldn’t stand the sight of my old mouse pad which is all ratty on the ends, is covered in coffee and tea stains and probably breakfast stains as well, and is all together quite uninspirational and virtually unusable. I’ll do you a big favor and not show it to you.
So I finally decided that I could take 15 minutes out of my day to do this small project which also happens to be another perfect project for one of my injured prints. I’ve already shown you a couple of nice projects I’ve done using injured prints … a wallet I use every day and some lovely fabric postcards.
So I dug up another injured print and rather than the 15 minutes it thought it might take to finish the project, it in fact only took about 5 minutes and I have a fabulous new mousepad to show for it! Here’s how I did it …
The first thing you need is an injured print. This was a fairly large print that slipped at the end (of course) during printing and you can see that the colors went a little screwy on the right hand side. However the rest of the print was fine and almost just the right size for a mouse pad. I painted a sealer over the top of the print so it gave it a slightly rough surface and this will also protect from spills.
You also need some thick stabilizer like timtex or peltex, fusible on one side …
… and some grip matting …
I wanted a finished size of 8″ x 9″ so I cut each piece slightly oversize, then fused the print to the stabilizer, cut it to size, and zigzag stitched around the edges.
I was then going to fuse the grip matting to the back of the peltex however it didn’t fuse too well so I ended up gluing it on which worked perfectly. The grip mat is the perfect thing to hold the mousepad in place and stop it from slipping all over the place.
Then I carefully trimmed away the excess matting from around the edges being careful not to cut the stitching. And …. ta! da! one fabulous mouse pad whipped up in no time at all and much better looking than my old mouse pad!
And don’t forget .. my favorite method of making fabulous prints (injured or not) is using digital grounds – you’ll find LOTS of info here.
Printing on Fabric 101: Printer Inks
Continuing the series Printing on Fabric 101. Last week we looked at printer feed paths so today I’ll discuss printer inks, which is another important aspect when printing on fabric.
Understanding inkjet printer inks can get a little confusing because each printer manufacturer makes their inks using different technologies and these technologies are advancing and changing constantly. I’ll try and keep this simple to understand for those of us (including me) who don’t really care about technologies but do want our printed images to have crisp clear detail, the color to be bright and fade-resistant, and the print to be either water resistant or waterproof depending on your application.
I discussed in a previous article how to make your printed images waterproof, but what about fade-resistance, color brightness and detail? A general understanding of printer inks will help you understand these features.
Types of Inks
The most common printer inks used in home printers fall into one of two categories – pigment-based or dye-based although some printers use a combination of both types. For example some printers will use a combination of a black cartridge with pigment based ink and color cartridges with dye-based ink. If you’re not sure what type of ink your printer uses, refer to the printer manual or check online with the manufacturer.
Dye Based Inks
Dye Based Inks are generally more vivid in color than pigment based inks however as technology advances this is changing, however dye based inks are less water and fade resistant than pigment based inks. They also tend to take a little longer to dry and this can sometimes cause blurring of the image.
Pigment Based Inks
Pigment Based Inks on the other hand are more light fast and generally water resistant. Although less intense in color than dye based inks, as mentioned previously improvements are constantly being made to improve this feature.
Let’s see it in action
The best way to demonstrate is always by testing. The picture on the left is the image I used. The picture on the right is the image printed on untreated fabric using two different printers; the “pigment ink” print was printed on my Epson Workforce 1100 using durabrite (pigment) inks, the “dye ink” print was printed on my Epson RX595 using claria (dye) inks. Both prints were printed using exactly the same printer settings but the results are only *similar*, not the same.
If you look closely you can see that the “pigment ink” print has printed significantly more detail than the “dye ink” print and you can notice this particularly around the center of the main flower where the “pigment ink” print has printed the little black dots in detail, but the “dye ink” print has not and the detail is blurred. The color on the “pigment ink” print is also more true to the original image.
And this is not the only difference. After washing only for a few seconds, this is what happened… You can see that even when printed on untreated fabric the “pigment ink” print holds the ink much better than the “dye ink” print. Even though Epson doesn’t guarantee their durabrite inks to be waterproof, only water-resistant, they do in fact hold up well with a hand wash.
Fade Resistance
As technology advances, printer inks are becoming more and more fade resistant. However there are also products that can be used to ensure further fade resistance as well as additional moisture resistance, such as Krylon Preserve It! which is a spray-on preservative for inkjet prints. The manufacturer guarantees that the spray will double the life of your printed image so if you want your printed images to be around and looking as good as new in a couple of hundred years you might consider using this type of product.
I use this product and I have to warn that it should be used outside because the fumes are quite overwhelming. You would also want to leave your prints in a well ventilated area for a day or two until the smell and fumes dissipate.
Generic vs Brand Name Inks
When printing on fabric your goal is to print high quality images, preferably water and fade resistant, and I can’t stress enough that generic inks simply will not provide these features.
Regardless of what the companies that sell generic ink tell you, generic inks are not of the same quality as brand name inks and do not meet the same standards, which is why they are cheaper than brand inks. Manufacturers spend a lot of money developing their inks to meet very specific requirements such as color and image quality, and fade and water resistance which means that genuine ink cartridges will provide you with very specific results which is often important when printing high quality, long lasting, images on fabric.
So What’s The Bottom Line?
The best printer for printing on fabric without a doubt a printer that uses pigment-based inks and has a straight through or an L-shaped feed. With some brands you still may have problems feeding, however most printers have a “thick paper” setting that you could try. My personal favorite is an Epson printer that uses durabrite (pigment) inks. This type of printer always provides me with troublefree printing and always gives the best results in color, detail and clarity, and washability.
It should be mentioned that I constantly hear reports about how the ink jets on the Epson printers are prone to clogging, however I’ve used Epson printers for 8 years or so and have only ever had one occurrence of this when I put my printer into storage and didn’t use it for about 8 months. Otherwise I leave my printers on all the time and have never experienced any problems whatsoever.
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