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03:04

If you have an inkjet printer and you enjoy quilting, you'll love putting family photos onto a piece of fabric that you can quilt into a long-lasting memento. Sew-on inkjet fabric sheets are washable and permanent, photos look great on them, and they're readily available at hobby and craft stores as well as fabric and quilting shops.
Best of all, printing on fabric is easy and quick; in fact, you can complete this little project in 10–13 minutes. So dig out your favorite photos, warm up your inkjet printer, and get started!
  1. 1. Choose the photo you want to print. The fabric sheets are 8.5 inches by 11 inches, so the image you choose should be large and sharp. Do any necessary photo editing using graphics software. If you don't have any, try Gimp or Adobe Photoshop Express (both are free).
  2. 2. Test the print with a piece of paper first. Use inkjet paper (not cheap copy paper) and set the printer to print at its highest quality. Check the results to make sure the photo's color looks good and the image is clear and sharp. Repeat step 1 if you need to make any tweaks.
  3. 3. Make sure the fabric sheet has no loose threads before you load it into the printer. If there are, cut them (don’t pull) and load up the sheet.
  4. 4. Set the printer settings for plain paper. Print the image and let the ink dry for a few minutes before you handle the fabric sheet.
  5. 5. Peel the paper backing from the sheet. It’s now ready to be used for quilting.

Tips


  • Choose a sharp picture that will look good at a large size.
  • Get some paper made for inkjet printers; it'll give you a better idea of what your printed fabric sheet will look like.
  • Test-print before you print on the fabric sheet; the fabric sheets are not cheap, so you don't want to waste any.


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02:57

                      

Few commercial print shops can print white ink on dark paper successfully. Those professional print houses that can usually charge handsomely for the service.
If you are looking for the effect of white ink on dark paper, then you have options, but white ink is typically not one of them. Regardless of the method you choose, printing white is usually more expensive than printing other ink colors.

Why It's So Difficult to Use White Ink

Most inks used in offset printing are translucent, and a translucent white ink cannot cover a dark color paper. Even if your print shop prints with an opaque white ink, multiple applications are necessary for sufficient coverage, which bumps up the cost of a print project astronomically.
For example, envision yourself painting a room white that had previously been painted a dark color. The white paint has to have good coverage with several coats or your white room will be darkened by the underlying paint. 
Adding even more to the price is the considerable time on the part of the print shop staff that is spent cleaning the printing press to remove all traces of other ink colors that would muddy the white ink.
However, there are acceptable alternatives to offset printing using white ink. You can print using reverse type, use silver ink, use white foil, or screen printing.

Print the Dark Color in Reverse

Approach the print or design project from a different angle. You can print the dark color with the type reversed on white paper, which means that when you want an element to print white, you reverse or “knock out” the white type or element from the background. No ink is applied anywhere you want white, just around it as a background. In essence, "printing in white" is the absence of any ink.
If your design includes white elements – for example, a white heart on a red background – only the red is printed and the white heart is the paper showing through. This option is much less expensive to print. Obviously, this method won't work if the paper you use isn't white.

Mix White Ink and Silver

A near-white ink effect that provides adequate coverage can be achieved by mixing silver ink with opaque white ink. The downfall here is that not all print shops provide this service, and the cost can be much higher than regular printing.

Use White Foil

Another option for getting white color on the page is using white foil stamping to get the effect you want. Foils come in many colors and textures including metallic, gloss, and matte finishes. An opaque white gloss or matte finish mimics the look of paint or white ink, or you can achieve special effects with pearlescent, off-white, or silvery foils. Professional printing houses usually have foil processing options. They may have special requirements in preparing your artwork for foil stamping or embossing. This service usually has a premium cost attached to it as well.

Try Screen Printing and Flexography White Inks

Screen printing and flexography methods which are often used to print on garments and plastics, use opaque white inks. You can explore those printing options for your project when you need to print white ink. In some cases, screen printing has applications other than just textile printing.

White Ink on a Desktop Printer


Epson sells a white ink cartridge for use with its inkjet printers. This option might work for small print runs on your home printer, but the cost of the white ink cartridge is much higher than typical ink cartridges.
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02:44


Printing the Same Thing on Both Sides of the Paper




Unlike sheetwise printing where each side of the sheet of paper is different, with work-and-turn each side of a sheet of paper is printed the same. Work-and-turn refers to how the sheet of paper is flipped over side-to-side to be sent back through the press. The top edge of the paper (the gripper edge) that went through on the first pass is the same edge to go in first on the second pass. The side edges are flipped. Using work-and-turn, you don't need a second set of printing plates because the same set is used for both sides.
Work-and-turn is similar to the work-and-tumble method; however, pages need to be placed on the page differently with each method so that you achieve the correct front-to-back printing.
Designers don't always have a say in which method is used. Printers may have a preferred method of handling the printing of the reverse side of the sheet so talk to your printer about the pros and cons of each method and determine if there is any significant advantage of one over the other for your specific print job. In many cases, whatever is customary for your printer will be fine.

Examples of Work-and-Turn

  1. You have a double-sided 5"x7" postcard that you are printing 8-up on a sheet of paper. Instead of putting 8 copies of the postcard on one side of the paper you set it up with 4 copies of the front in column A and 4 copies of the back of the postcard in column B. You have one set of printing plates for each color used and it is composed of both the front and back sides of your postcard. Once you run off one side of the sheet of paper and it dries it is flipped over and run through a second time so that the same thing is printed on that side of the paper. However, because of the way you arranged it for printing, the two sides of the postcard will print front-to-back (if they aren't arranged correctly, you could end up with 2 fronts on one postcard and 2 backs on another).
  2. You have an 8-page booklet. You have one set of printing plates for each color of ink. The printing plates contain all 8 pages You print all 8 pages on one side of the sheet of paper then print the same 8 pages on the other side. Note that pages must first be put in the correct order or imposition so that the pages print correctly (i.e. page 2 on the back of page 1) and it can vary depending on the number of pages and how it is to be printed, cut, and folded. After printing, each sheet of paper is cut and folded to create 2 copies of your 8-page booklet. 

    Cost Considerations

    Because it requires only one set of printing plates for printing each side work-and-turn printing can be less expensive than doing the same print job sheetwise. Depending on the size of your document you may also be able to save on paper by using work-and-turn.

    More On Desktop Printing


    The terms sheetwise, work-and-turn, and work-and-tumble typically apply to the handling of printed and imposed sheets during the commercial printing process. However, when manually doing duplex printing from your desktop or network printer you would also employ similar techniques when feeding the printed pages back through the printer. 
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    02:36

    Although state-of-the-art commercial printing companies are moving to digital printing, many printers still use the tried-and-true offset printing method that has been the standard in commercial printing for more than a century.

    Offset Printing Process

    Offset lithography—one of the most common way to print ink on paper—usesprinting plates to transfer an image to paper or other substrates. The plates are usually made of a thin sheet of metal, but in some instances, plates may be plastic, rubber or paper. Metal plates are more expensive than paper or other plates, but they last longer, produce high-quality images on paper and have greater accuracy than plates made of other materials. 
    An image is put on the printing plates using a photomechanical or photochemical process during a stage of production known as prepress—one plate for each color ink to be printed. 
    Printing plates are attached to the plate cylinders on the printing press. Ink and water are applied to rollers and then transferred to an intermediary cylinder (blanket) and then to the plate, where the ink clings only to the imaged areas of the plate. Then the ink transfers to the paper.

    Prepress Plating Decisions

    A print job that prints only in black ink requires only one plate. A print job that prints in red and black ink requires two plates. In general, the more plates that are needed to print a job, the higher the price.
    Things become more complicated when color photos are involved. Offset printing requires the separation of colored images into four ink colors—cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The CMYK files eventually become four plates that run on the printing press at the same time on four cylinders. CMYK is different from the RGB (red, green, blue) color model you see on your computer screen. The digital files for every print job are examined and adjusted to minimize the number of plates needed to print the project and to convert color images or complicated files to only CYMK. 
    In some cases, there may be more than four plates—if a logo must appear in a certain Pantone color, for example, or if a metallic ink is used in addition to full-color images.
    Depending on the size of the finished printed product, several copies of the file may be printed on a large sheet of paper and then trimmed to size afterward. When a job prints on both sides of the sheet of paper, the prepress department may impose the image to print all fronts on one plate and all backs on another, an imposition known as sheetwise, or with both the front and back on a single plate in a work-and-turn or work-and-tumble layout. Of these, sheetwise is usually the most expensive because it takes double the number of plates. Depending on the size of the project, the number of inks and the size of the sheet of paper, the prepress department chooses the most efficient way to impose the project on the plates.

    Other Plate Types

    In screen printing, the screen is the equivalent of the printing plate. It can be created manually or photochemically and is usually a porous fabric or stainless steel mesh stretched over a frame.

    Paper plates are usually suitable only for short print runs without close or touching colors that require trapping. Plan your design so that paper plates can be used effectively if you want to save money. Not all commercial printers offer this option.
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