Digital Printed Fabric

Why Digital?

I wanted to experiment by using my lino cut designs by repeating and reducing the images to create a design for fabrics. Was there a way to get my designs in multi-colour/smaller/larger etc? I could use the lino itself but there are a few factors which influenced my choice. Lino is great for printing one or two images upon fabric after that screen printing is a much more economical process in terms of time and possible errors when wanting to print a large area and meters of fabric. For the best visual design, depending on the size of the lino when using digital you can adapt the design very easily. For example when carving an image which you would like to repeat and turn it will only face one direction and you would have to carve another if you would like the two images to mirror each other.

So I started to explore what other options there are for fabric design. Spoonflower seems popular but I wondered what is out there a bit closer to home and whether Spoonflower is worth all the hype? So far I have found a few companies based in the UK, so it is a limited investigation so far but most quality ones have swatch testing and colour matching, here are the ones I have sampled so far...

Price:

HTS Web Site   Under 10 meters around £31 per meter on Linen not including postage. Over 10meters then it goes down to £23 per meter without postage.
Liberty Press Web Site   Small quantities £23 per meter on canvas cotton includes postage.
Spoonflower Web Site   Small quantities £18 per meter on linen/cotton mix includes postage.

As you can see it is tricky to beat Spoonflower on price, but what about quality?

Quality:

Colour matching- HTS offer the best quality in terms of fabric and best match to my colour design, the Linen is a natural colour and lovely and heavy perfect for cushions. After them Spoonflower were a close second and unfortunately Liberty came a poor last. After a cool wash the Liberty Press fabric was a real disappointment, patchy and faded! The Liberty Press fabric arrived within a day but I won't be ordering more. Such a shame as the Liberty Press site is easy to use and they offer wall paper and scarf design service which I can not pass comment on.

After washing @30 degrees reduced spin cycle-Liberty Press- Left side.

Compare that with the quality of what you can achieve by hand, even after washing it is light fast.

Lino relief printing

OK so you could hand wash the Liberty Press fabric but it still can't compare to hand printing.

If you like the idea of using a British based company and are going to order several meters of fabric then HTS would be a good starting point, with good customer service and quality fabrics, if however you only want a meter or so then Spoonflower is a great option if you are in no rush for the fabric as it takes 3 weeks minimum to arrive to the UK.

I never realised how complicated it would be just to get my designs onto fabric, there are lots of types of printed fabric and as a savvy customer I like to know my options! You really need to have an idea of the types of printing that is available, this page was helpful in developing my understanding... Types of Digital Printing:  I think as digital printing develops it will become more readily available to the end user but as for now it really is only affordable in the UK on larger quantities. 

So for me Spoonflower came out on top but I think, after all the best results for me, in terms of colour and fastness has to be using the Lino directly! Full circle! I think I will be having a go at screen printing also so I will keep you posted on my results. I have just found a gorgeous heavy Russian Linen so I can't wait to print on that :) Here are samples of my hand printed cushions...

Please feel free to share your explorations into digital printing...