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I am embarking on a project which will require me to get 50+ meters of heavy organic cotton jersey digitally printed.

I have sourced a print house to do the printing at a reasonable price and they use dupont inks. They have told me that I don't need to pre-treat my fabric (which I am sourcing elsewhere), that dupont inks adhere well and that I won't lose much colour through washing. I'm not sure if this is actually the case.

I was wondering if anyone has experience with these types of inks. I am concerned that if I don't pre-treat my fabric, the colour will fade too much. But pre-treating can be a costly endeavour which I would like to avoid if possible. It is important that I use natural fabric and that the print will withstand a lot of washing. I'm working on a limited budget.

Also, is it true that synthetic fabrics hold colour better than naturals?

Thanks in advance for any help

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  • I don't know if the fabric inks are like the paper inks, but one of the folks here did a test of using HP ink with different types of paper ... and then put them up in sunlight. Over the years, it's amazing how much the difference in fading is. I suspect that the HP ink was specially formulated for the HP paper, as it didn't fare so well on the others. (note : this was for a poster printer, which is why there's special paper for it).
    – Joe
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 13:25
  • I edited the tags here because this seems to be specifically about how the Dupont inks will hold up. If you're question was about finding a type of ink that worked best, I'd say keep this as a material-selection. But in this case, it seems that you're mostly trying learn more about what you've got available.
    – user24
    Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 14:44
  • Yeah, I'd mostly like to know about the dupont inks, although any information would be useful. It's a bit of a tricky area because inks will react differently depending on the fabric type. Thanks.
    – Mapuja
    Commented Aug 6, 2016 at 19:36

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I don't know about the inks your referring to specifically but given your concern about too much fading, you may want to consider pre-treating your fabric and being done with it, esp. if you don't trust your print shop or its very important it is to my customer that the design not fade. My perspective is more of from that of a professional artist/craftsman working on a project, although I would want to spend as little as possible, I would need to weigh the cost of doing it once well against the cost of having to redo something that didn't work out. I hope this helps.

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