Textiles

[Ryan Mack]

Hi all, I'm thinking of turning one of my wife's penguin photographs into a sweater. It's probably going to be an anniversary gift so I'm not terribly cost conscious, I mostly care about the quality of the finished product. If I wanted to go high end, I see a number of companies that make cashmere custom sweaters but they may require higher volumes than I'm interested in. Should I look into buying a small format dye sub printer? Does that work on wool and/or cashmere? Any direction would be appreciated. Thanks, Ryan

[dgberg]

A good article on the subject.
https://northlandcashmere.com/cashmere-digital-and-screen-printing/#:~:text=Digital%20printing%20is%20most%20commonly,fabric%20due%20to%20static%20electricity.

We do dye sub and HPV, heat press vinyl and I know they will not work. DTG, Direct To Garmet is also not recommended.
The only other way that I know of is to get it sewn on. Has to be a tighter wool but may work. Finding someone to do a one off is always fun.
Screenprinting may be the ticket, the one off could be the killer here again.

[Ryan Mack]

Thanks, that's very helpful. I reached out to Alpine Cashmere which offers custom photographs on their garments but the min order size is 100 units. I see there's a few companies that could do lower cost prints on cotton/synthetic hoodies. Anybody that you've worked with before? bagsoflove.com has a great UI for online design. If I'm going down that road, would it be better for me to try doing this myself with dye sub? Thanks again for your insights. -Ryan

[MfAlab]

If you're not terribly cost conscious, why not ask a knitting master hand made for you? Would be better than a photo printed on a sweater.

[Ryan Mack]

If you're not terribly cost conscious, why not ask a knitting master hand made for you? Would be better than a photo printed on a sweater.

That's a good idea, I'm still trying to figure that out. So far I've found either hand done stuff that doesn't look very good or fully automated knitting which requires a minimum order of 100 units (at $300 each!)

[mearussi]

Go to a knitting store and ask around for some good knitters.

[Alistair]

Digital printing on fabric is quite complex with different inks required for different fibres; Reactive and pigment ink for plant fibres (cotton, linen etc.), Acidic for protein fibres (wool, silk etc.) and sublimation for synthetic long-chain polymer based fibres (polyester, nylon etc). In addition to digital printing there is also screen printing and a whole other set of inks for that. Save yourself heartache and get a digital print on cotton using pigment inks. If you want to get something made, prepare a file and send it to Spoonflower and have some fabric printed and made into a garment or curtains, pillow cases, cushions etc. etc. Or even easier, to print on an existing garment, get a DTG (direct to garment) print but get it made on a WHITE garment and ask the printer to pretreat the garment and print at the highest quality. Personally I do not care for DTG prints on dark garments as the white ink that needs to be printed as a base layer is heavy latex and gives the garment an unpleasant hand. Worse even than a plastisol screen print.