Digital Textile Printing (DTP) has been making gains in the
signs and banners marketplace. And ever so slowly, it is even making gains in
the garment industry. Not fast enough for my tastes, but that’s because I have
been designing for the DTP Garment industry since slightly before its
inception.
Back in the 1995, I began making seamless, tile-able images
for use as digital wallpaper for the Macintosh computer. In those days, you had
only a canvas of 72 pixels by 72 pixels, and were limited to a palette of 128 colors.
Still, this was a vast improvement over the background images called “ppats”
from Macintosh system 7.2 and earlier. No need to edit your background
resources using ResEdit or anything like that! Anyway, I implemented a simple chiaroscuro
effect to mimic the warp and weft of a fabric.
Pixel by pixel, I created
digital copies of the neckties in my wardrobe, along with the candy-striped
oxford cloth shirts, the tattersall patterned broadcloth shirts, my herringbone
and houndstooth tweed jackets, and so forth. One day I came upon a book in the
library that contained instructions for how to weave the most popular Scottish
tartans. As the size of my canvas grew, I expanded into all manner of textile
designs. I began communicating by email with several of the key players in
digital textile printing.
WASATCH COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY, based here in Salt Lake City, Utah, told me a little-known story about how Barbie created the ditigal textile industry. They then introduced me to WASATCH SOFTRIP TX and to Wendy Ragsdale, a woman who left Mattel and broke the secrets of digital textile printing to the rest of the world.
Sawgrass was an early innovator in digital textile printing, and has recently begun offering turnkey solutions for people who want to start their own fabric printing business. To my knowledge, they are the only company to offer complete printing systems, including consumables such as inks and media.
Jacquard InkJet Fabric Systems is an innovator in the industry that sells inks and treated fabrics for a wide range of applications. They make a patented steamer that is specifically designed for the DTP industry, allowing the dyes to set properly. They carry a wide range of inks and also fabrics.
Mimaki has made a big impression on the industry in the past couple of months as far as I can tell from my outsider perspective. Mike Horsten is getting a lot of press from his article “Why the home textile sector will switch to digital”. Here's one article about it and here is another one from India.
Epson's SureColor SC-F2000 recently made history by achieving Oeko-Tex certification for their textile print technology. You may be wondering what that all means. You'll get a better idea if I just copy the links from the Philosophy and Concept pages of their web site. It would be nice if Epson's printer for textiles would some day achieve the same notoriety with Wilhelm Research as they did for "permanence" with their StylusPro 7800.
WhiteWall is a photography print service that offers Oeko-Tex certified art printing as of this writing. Their site explains even more advantages to the DTP processes that they use to print images on polyester fabric. "The ink evaporates into the material completely. This means your image can be folded without white marks appearing, and it is fully protected against abrasion. The fabric is also resistant to external influences such as scratches, chemicals, or UV rays, and is even wash-proof. The modern process allows the reproduction of shots with 720dpi in high resolution, ensuring photo-realistic image sharpness and no pixellation. The expanded CMYK color spectrum produces particularly rich, true-to-original colors in different tonalities."
Here's a company in China that offers Oeko-Tex Standard 100 garment manufacturing, utilizing custom digital textile printing processes. It didn't take long for somebody to pounce on this technology, did it?
Lex Jet has been a supplier of innovative fabrics for a long time, but there are whispers on the horizon that there will be even MORE new fabrics for digital printing
First2Print™ is a large format digital fabric printing studio that specializes in short runs of custom designed fabrics for the garment, and interior design industries. I've been looking at this industry for a long time, but never had the money (or courage) to go out and get my feet wet. Judging from the quality of the materials these people show on their web site, I'm pretty sure they would be the best printing service to work with. I am most impressed by their story about working with conservators. Since I am interested in making fabrics that will last more than a couple of years (typical for inkjet prints), this caught my attention:
Arts and Conservation:
"First2Print teamed up with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to recreate a special time period dress. Inspired by an antique swatch of silk shantung and a historic design, the costume replication was created digitally by artists who scanned and cleaned up the image in Photoshop, for preparation for digital fabric printing." Granted, this is not a direct claim that their fabrics are archival safe, but they were good enough for this particular archive!
The company that opened the floodgates to digital textile printing is called Spoonflower. If you've heard of direct to textile printing, you've probably heard of Spoonflower. They have weekly design contests, and cater to lots of folks in the Interior Decorating industry, as well as a whole lot of quilters.
Speaking of quilters, there are plenty of folks out there who make their own quilt blocks using software tools called Electric Quilt. The Electric Quilt Company doesn't manufacture electric blankets (as their name implies), just as none of the digital textile companies mentioned here offer wearable computers from a digital loom. For that you'll have to look elsewhere. What you CAN get from The Electric Quilt Company is a variety of software, fabrics, and support from a growing community of users.
There are other manufacturers who cater to quilters and home sewers, but none that have the large user base that The Electric Quilt Company has been cultivating for the last 20 years. One noteworthy example of these other companies is PhotoFabric. I have, at times, heard of this stuff selling at fabric stores here in my home town, although I have never seen it on-shelf.
At the end of the day, on-shelf is where this stuff needs to end-up. In the mean time, you will need deep pockets and big dreams to engage in any kind of digital textile printing. That's how I see it, anyway.
In case you're curious, here are a few hundred of my fabric designs that have yet to be tiled and printed.
Here's a Windows program that allows you to view the above images tiled as mosaics.
Before I began using Windows for any design work, I always viewed my artwork tiled in "slideshow" mode using GraphicConverter. It's a bit more effort than the Windows solution, but the software has waaaay more to offer than simple image tiling.
Eventually, I'll try to create a Tiled Slideshow based on my Shutterfly Folder so you can view the images the way they were intended to be seen.
