Printing on cotton - pigment inks washable?

[stever]

My sister is a quilter and would like some of my images printed on cotton.  I friend of hers tested various fabrics and found one that is reasonbly colorfast when washed.  She printed some images on her Canon dye printer using a standard paper profile - pretty terrible color as might be expected.

After offering to experiment on my Epson 3200, i started to wonder if pigment inks will be as colorfast when washed as dye?

Would love to hear from someone with experience before wasting too much time.

Thanks

[John Nollendorfs]

There are several options for printing on cotton. The easiest is to use a heat transfer material to print on, then use a heat press to transfer it to the fabric. These usually like at least a 50-50 cotton/polyester fabric.

Then there are specially treated cotton fabrics--usually with a backer sheet to allow them to feed through the printer.

Then finally, there are the dye sublimation inks, which can be used to print on a transfer material, or directly on to fabrics--again heat activated.

Just do a google search for fabric printing, I'm sure you will find lots of options there!

John Nollendorfs

[enduser]

Using Jaquard cotton in 24" rolls we often print for quilters using our, or their own, images.  We use a Canon ipf6100 at a setting of "Special 10".

The cotton is removed from its paper backing using a hot iron setting and this process fixes the inks pretty permanently.

The result is very satisfactory, with image saturation only a bit weaker than on paper.  We have machine washed these prints on "Cold Wash" and the ink remains unchanged.  You do have to avoid the spin cycle as it leaves difficult to remove creases.

We have used silk in the same way, and linen is also available

[stever]

Thanks, color looks good using EMP - will run a washfast test.