Printed Fabric Factory Directory

How Fabric Printing Works

All printing starts with a prepared ground: the base cloth, cotton, polyester, blends, silk or rayon, is scoured, bleached and often mercerised so it takes colour evenly, because any unevenness in preparation prints through as cloudiness no design can hide. Rotary screen printing is the industry workhorse, forcing paste through engraved rotating screens, one per colour, at high speed for long runs. Flat screen printing suits shorter, finer work; copper roller printing, the oldest mechanised method, survives in niches; and digital inkjet printing has redrawn the trade by removing screens entirely, letting mills print photographs, huge repeats and runs of a few metres at the cost of speed and a different ink chemistry.

The chemistry sets the durability. Pigment prints sit on the surface in a binder: economical, workable on almost any fibre, but stiffer and less wash-proof at heavy coverage. Reactive dyes bond chemically into cotton and rayon for soft, wash-fast fashion prints; disperse dyes sublime into polyester with excellent fastness; vat and discharge printing serve workwear and special effects where the print must survive industrial washing or where a pattern is bleached out of a dyed ground. A print buyer judges all of it by registration, the alignment of the colours, handle, and fastness to washing, rubbing and light, in that order on a production sample rather than a strike-off.

Where Printed Fabric Is Used

Fashion is the visible market: dresses, shirts, skirts and scarves in florals, geometrics, animal prints and seasonal novelties, where print is the fastest way to make last season's base cloth this season's garment. Home textiles take printed cloth for curtains, bedding, upholstery and table linen, children's products for its licensed characters and bright repeats, and quilting for the coordinated cotton print collections that are an industry of their own. Uniform and promotional work uses printing for logos and camouflage, and technical users print everything from medical textiles to flags and banners, where the base cloth and ink are specified as one system. The same factory often prints its own woven or knitted base and buys in greige cloth to print for others.

The fourteen listings below are this directory's printed fabric factories, each linked to its Fabric Mills by Name profile: Best Textiles International Co.,Ltd, Shanghai Best Linen Cotton Textile Factory, Shenghong Group Co Ltd and Zhejiang Nanyixiang Textile CO.,LTD of China, Dimple International Corporation of Taiwan, Safer Textile Processing Corp. and Unitex International of the USA, Sri Jaisri Export of India, Usman Enterprises of Pakistan, and Glacial Exports, Lotus Mills, Rashid Textile Printing Ind. (Pvt.) Ltd., Sahiba Exports and The West Coast Weaving Establishment. None has been removed: no listing was verified dead, and this directory's standing rule is to keep a listing when in doubt. Thank you for using the Apparel Search Fabric Mill Directory.

Specifying and Buying Printed Fabric

Specify a print by base cloth, print method, dye or pigment system, number of colours, repeat size and fastness standards, and approve a production-range sample, not only the strike-off, because registration drift and colour variation appear at speed and distance into a run. Check the handle where coverage is heavy, since a stiff pigment area on a soft ground is the most common disappointment in printed fashion cloth, and confirm the pattern's repeat against the garment's pattern pieces, because a repeat that does not fit the marker wastes cloth or forces mismatched seams. For digital printing, confirm resolution, colour gamut expectations and wash fastness in writing, since inkjet prints vary more by mill than screen prints do.

Care for printed fabric follows the print system as much as the fibre. Wash prints inside out, cool to warm, with similar colours, because the first washes release loose surface colour from pigment and reactive prints alike; avoid bleach on any print and strong detergent on discharge and metallic effects. Dry printed cloth out of harsh direct sun, which fades surface prints faster than the ground beneath them, and iron on the reverse so heat and friction never meet the printed face directly. Stored rolled or folded with tissue, a good print keeps its colour for the life of the cloth under it.

Printed Fabric Factories Listed Here