Navigating the Nuances of Textile Printing

MY Prints LA worked with the hit HBO show “Westworld” to print fabric for the actors’ costumes. Credit: Warner Brothers with HBO, 2017.

Understanding Fabric is Crucial

Moreno says the No. 1 challenge when working with stretchy fabric in particular, such as in the case of the “Transformers” unitards, is ink penetration. He explains that some fabrics have ribs, and if the ribs stretch and there isn’t enough ink penetration between them, you see the fabric “smiling,” which is when the color of the fabric shows between the printed aspects. For example, when black ink is printed on white fabric, it could appear gray when stretched.

When a business is considering adding textile printing capabilities, Moreno suggests hiring someone knowledgeable in fabric to prevent circumstances like “smiling” from happening.

“Fabric is the key to a good quality print,” he says. “Understanding the fabric’s construction and fabric’s content is key. Not all fabrics will work.”

Mark A. Sunderland, textile engineer and director of Textile Material Technology at Thomas Jefferson University, also points to stretch and performance fabrics as being complex and “tricky” to work with, but says more designers are going to be using these fabrics in the future.

“Sometimes, when we make a print design and then we stretch it over a 3D form, it doesn’t necessarily look like the designs we intended it to be,” he says. 

Not only could the print end up looking muddied if the ink isn’t adequately administered on the fabric, it is crucial to understand that some fabrics simply cannot stand up to the printing process, Moreno explains.

“If you have a polyester-nylon blend,” Moreno says, “most nylons will burn when it comes to the temperature needed for the dye-sublimation process.”

Knowing that most nylons are sensitive to temperature, Moreno says there are solutions to prevent it from happening. Printers can work with the time or temperature settings to alleviate the problem, however, “experience with fabric is key,” he says.

In addition to understanding the properties of fabrics and how to work with them, it is also something that specifically needs to be communicated to designers when working with them, Sunderland stresses.