If you read my blog you know I adore Liberty London fabrics. Unfortunately there are designs that are either out of print or exclusive to shops in Europe that don’t ship to the US. Years ago I tried printing fabric on my inkjet printer with fairly good results. I recently purchased an Epson ET-4700 inkjet printer ( which I love ) and decided to experiment printing on fabric with a Liberty Betsy colorway I can’t find available online. If you do know where I can buy this print that ships to the US, please let me know!
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There are 2 things to consider when printing on fabric at home with our inkjet printer. Note this doesn’t cover everything so I suggest researching further if you want to try printing on fabric to explore your options.
1. The ink will disappear if you wash the fabric after it’s printed. There are solutions you can use to pre-treat the fabric with before or after printing to prevent the ink from fading. It also depends on your printer ink. I’ve read ones that use pigment inks won’t out but my printers have dye-based inks which will. You can also buy pre-treated fabric sheets to print on.
2. There are different ways to stabilize the fabric before you can print. I used freezer paper glued on top of printing paper to stabilize the fabric before printing but there are other methods where you can use double sided tape to stabilize the fabric for printing.
I saw this Liberty Betsy colorway posted on Instagram and took a screenshot to test printing on fabric. I used Microsoft Paint to crop the picture and duplicate it to fit on a 8.5 x 11 inch letter size printing paper.
I changed the saturation levels to print the same design because it turned out lighter on my first try. The one on the far right has the most details at the highest saturation level.
This is a close up of the most saturated print from the far right. I couldn’t get a complete picture of the design from Instagram so you can see how the design doesn’t run all the way through from top to bottom.
Here is the printed fabric on the left with an actual Liberty Betsy print I purchased from Japan. It’s not the same colorway but I wanted to show you a side by side of fabric printed on an inkjet versus a real print for comparison. Of course the real one is way better than the printed but since I can’t even get my hands on the actual print I have to settle for this until then.
If you use the freezer paper method like I did, make sure the paper and fabric lies absolutely flat or else you’ll get ink smudges on your fabric like this one that I printed.
Have you tried printing on fabric before? I would love to hear about your experience printing on fabric at home.
If you love Liberty Betsy as much as I do, you can compare your collection to my stash 🙂
