Digital Textile Printing – Synthetics

The minimum we can supply is one meter. Please note there is a setup charge of R250 on orders less than 5m

ArtLab was the first company in AFRICA to bring you reactive dye, pigment printing and sublimation printing under one roof – which means we can print almost ALL fabric types quickly and efficiently. These include cotton poplin, twill, bull denim, viscose/Rayon, linen, silks and hemp. We are now also printing with dye-sublimation inks so we can now print onto Polyesters, Lycra, Nylon, flag material as well.

Our natural fabrics are printed using a pigment ink process. We have replaced our reactive dying process with pigments for a number of reasons. No steaming or washing is required which is faster, more cost effective and FAR more environmentally friendly. The fabrics are also a lot less “hammered” without going through the steaming and washing process. Very important for linens etc.

Our pigment inks are the very latest technology and are providing colour bloom, fastness and soft hand that now rivals that of reactive dye printing.

You can bring in your own fabric for printing. Our fabrics are prepared with a special binding coating to enhance colour and washability. Your own fabrics can also be coated for optimum quality but a minimum of 25m is required as it has to go through a large coating stenter. Please note we do not take responsibility for results on clients own supplied fabric as there are too many variables involved that can affect the print result. For e.g. the fabric may not be properly prepared for print – de-sized, scoured etc. We always recommend our own pre-teste fabrics for best results.

Digital printing is a whole lot quicker than traditional processes. Generally we like to offer a 7 working day turnaround but this depends on current workloads. If you have pressing deadlines we may under certain conditions be able to expedite your order to a shorter turn-around. This is at our discretion and a 50% surcharge will apply

Yes – Our Sublimation Printing is particularly wash-fast like any other commercial fabric. Our Pigment Printing process – which is great for colour matching and printing on the widest range of fabrics – requires a more gentle wash and drying treatment for optimal colour retention. Please require at the time of printing on the best care instructions for your fabric and ink type.

No – one of the benefits of digital printing is that you can have up to 17 million colours at no extra charge. It costs no more or less to do one colour or thousands.

We can work with most file formats but ideally your art should be supplied as a RGB Tiff or Jpeg at a minimum 150 dpi at the print size. We don’t need more than 150 DPI in order to give you a great result by the way!

We can accept large files via the web. You can email file sup to 20MB via email. Please use Wetransfer for files over 20MB. (www.wetransfer.com/)

If your design is a seamless repeatable panel you do not have to do the repeat yourself. We can do endless repeats at the print stage. Simply ensure that your repeatable graphic is to the correct size – we will do the rest!

N.B. It is the responsibility of the client to ensure all artwork supplied to be repeated is 100% accurately set-up to repeat seamlessly. Artlab will not be liable for repeats that do not tile accurately from art supplied by the customer.

At ArtLab all our printing processes are calibrated to the highest industry standards. However – textile printing is DIFFICULT (otherwise everyone would be doing it!) and there are a number of variables involved right down to air temperature and humidity that can affect colour from one batch to another. Various batches of fabric have different cellulose content and other chemicals and factors involved that means there are often batch to batch variations. While our colour matching is generally world class, it must be accepted that there could be variances from screen and from batch to batch.

We do not warrantor agree to undertake any absolute colour matching. Especially to client screen images (which are meaningless unless the screen has been properly calibrated to a set standard).

We are happy to supply a Pantone chart at a nominal charge on the fabric of your choice for best possible colour matching purposes.

ArtLab is based in Cape Town. We do however ship nationwide (and internationally). We need to know quantities, packing requirements and your location before we can price shipping.

Our pricing off our price-list does include printing and the fabric. Where clients supply their own fabric only the print charge is applicable. You can find our pricing here: Textile Printing Pricing