DSF

do you mean buy a ready made blank cushion cover from dunelm? Or just buy the fabric..?

We buy the fabric in by the roll, print designs onto it, and then cut and sew into cushions (Well, another company does the cutting/sewing as we haven't got time for that!) but this gives us better end-results than printing onto cushions that are already made up.

buy the cushions, taken the filling bag out, put over the press, and then press and re-stuffed with the filling bag

Jimbo;53231 wrote:Octi-Tech (Sheffield) are bringing out a range of some kind of leather for sublimation including cushions, mobile phone cases, wallets coasters etc.
seen pics on another forum.

another forum? Theres another forum? Are you sure?

T-Shirt Forums has a big sublimation forum on it

pisquee;83117 wrote:We buy the fabric in by the roll, print designs onto it, and then cut and sew into cushions (Well, another company does the cutting/sewing as we haven't got time for that!) but this gives us better end-results than printing onto cushions that are already made up.

Do you print directly on to the fabric with dye sub inks? Does it need pressing like normal?

We use a wide format rotary heat press to transfer the sublimation inks, after printing from a wide format printer with industrial sublimation inks on rolls of sublimation paper.

pisquee;83129 wrote:We use a wide format rotary heat press to transfer the sublimation inks, after printing from a wide format printer with industrial sublimation inks on rolls of sublimation paper.

what at is the difference between industrial inks and say sublijet iq inks?

They're manufactured for wide format commercial printers and sold in bulk litre (and above) quantities for printing big rolls of fabrics. Rather than Sawgrass' consumer inks which are mostly used in small cheap printers intended for home/office use.

Imagine a factory with printers which cost £5000+ printing rolls of fabric costing £100s. The printer clogging up and messing up a roll of fabric, and putting a machine out of action is going to be a big loss of money and productivity to the business. Consumer level inks go in printers, which are on average probably around £100, and print a few mugs costing relative pennies. If these inks aren't great, then the printer is cheap to replace and a few wasted mugs don't add up in the same way as a roll of fabric.

This is all just my opinion mind on different types of inks, my way of looking at things, although comes from our experiences of moving away from Sawgrass consumer level inks, to large format/industrial inks. The 'industrial' and 'consumer' definitions of the inks are from Sawgrass.

I see what you are saying. I was looking at the epson 7890 for printing, would you say this is up to the job in your experience?