Karma craft is a new custom fabric printer – that I have recently found out about – has anyone used them yet? love to hear what the quality is like…
The process is simple – and well explained - and they have a large (and promises to expand into hemp + wool soon) range of fabrics – they do custom orders for specialised fabric though if you are interested in purchasing over 20 yards – however the minimum order is only 1 yard. Their current range of fabric includes several graded/weights of cotton, including a cotton linen combo, cotton canvas and organic cotton, they also have linen, silk, and some polyesters. Prices are not cheap however with the cheapest cotton $25 per yard – this is due to the use of reactive dyes rather than textile pigments and the reactive dye process is MUCH more time consuming and the quality of colour is supposed to be much better.
They do print in China – even though they are registered in the US – and according to Scott the founder of Karma Craft – they have a nice facility which passes the REACH regulations for environmental safety.
For a broader look at print on demand fabric companies – check out Trueup’s article comparing a few different places – including Karma Craft and Spoonflower and a couple of others as well.
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There is a cheaper online store called Spoonflower (http://www.spoonflower.com) at $18 per yard.
They also do custom printing.
thanks Joan
We know about spoonflower and love them – its good to know who else is doing this sort of printing too.
I have used Spoonflower and want to compare the quality but the same files I used for spoonflower wouldn’t load and I never got an answer when I mailed them. I think (don’t quote me on that) that they do all the printing in China which got me wondering about the inks they use etc. at least with Spoonflower I know they are doing all the printing in the most eco friendly way possible.
Hi JoJo this is Scott from Karma Kraft. I’m sorry we never received your e-mail we would certainly be happy to print your fabric. Just a little background, I went to NCSU College of Textile in Raleigh, NC. I have been designing fabric for upholstery for 10 years. I have actually had to move to China to continue in my field. I have a group of experienced textile folks that I work with here to assure the quality for our prints are very high. Our faculity actually passes the REACH regulations for environmental safety and we have quite a few designers printing on our organic cotton which uses the high quality reactive dye brand DyStar. The reason we are a little higher priced than some others is quite simply because we use the reactive dye process. Using reactive dyes for printing is a more time consuming process than when printing with textile pigments which some other people use. The result in using reactives is the dye actually penetrates the fiber as opposed to just laying on top of the surface of the fabric. After printing our fabric is also washed, softened and dried creating a fabric rich in color and wonderful in hand. So when comparing reactive dyed printed fabrics to textile pigment printed fabrics you are not comparing apples to apples on a quality nor pricing basis. I hope this explains a bit more about our process. If you would be interested in giving us a try please feel free to contact us. We typically answer e-mails the same day so I’m not sure what happened to your mail before but please send us one again. Thanks! Hope to hear from you soon!
True Up did a great comparison of a couple of different custom fabric printers. Check it out at: http://www.trueup.net/?p=5364