Create your own calico fabric printed with your personalised design. Printed calico material is a beautifu...
Read More
Ships in 3 - 4 days
Delivery $15.95
Handmade
Printing on calico gives your fabric a natural, rustic feel; the natural cotton gives a soft print which is slightly muted with warm undertones.
When you hear the word calico, most people instantly think of calico cats. Calico cats are cats with a mainly white coat, and patches of two other colours. When calico applies to a fabric, many people assume it means roughly the same thing. This is, however, not the case. Calico print fabric doesn't refer to the colouring at all, it refers in fact to the fabric itself. Calico fabric is a plain-woven material; it is made from unbleached cotton, which is often not fully processed. It isn't quite as fine as muslin, however it's much less thick and coarse than a textile like denim or canvas. Calico fabric gets its name from a city called Calicut, which is in southwestern India and is where the fabric is originally from.
Calico printing is done here in our Bags of Love studio; we work to quick turnaround times and ensure that amazing high-quality is maintained. Our fabrics are all printed digitally, however there is more than one method in which we do this. The main method that we use for natural fabrics is pigment printing. Simply design your calico fabrics online and we will print your personalised design directly onto the the calico fabric. This prints in a very localised method, applying the coloured dyes to a particular part of the calico fabric. Calico printing uses this method to slowly build up the design onto your calico print fabric. Printing on calico produced detailed results, with warm undertones and a slightly muted print.
You have a choice of four different edge finishes when you use our custom design calico printing. You can either have your calico print fabric sent to you "As Is" which will be sent exactly as it comes out of the printer; with a white border about the edges. You can have your printed calico material "Cut on the Line" which will have had that white border expertly removed by one of our specialists. If you would prefer you can choose to have your calico printing hemmed. You'll get the option of two colours for the thread of your hems; either black or white. Your calico printing will be beautifully hemmed using an overlocked hem which is stitched completely over the edges of your printed calico fabric, by one of our expert seamstresses.
We print at 200dpi, which is a good combination of quality and file weight. Ideally, your image should be scaled to 100% at 200dpi; this means that no resizing of your file occurs, preventing any interpolation. Our design interface will have a quality marker next to the design that you have uploaded, this will change colour using a traffic light system and display a message. The message will let you know if the resolution is too low or if you have a good quality image.
When you upload your design our system will automatically scale it to fit your chosen fabric dimensions. In the ‘Product Options’ tab, the displayed dimensions under ‘Print Size’ will show the dimensions of the piece of fabric that you are ordering. For image/design dimensions you need to see the ‘Images & Text Tools’ tab. You can see and edit the dimensions of the image under the quality information next to the thumbnail.
We advise providing images in the RGB colour space. Specifically using the sRGB image profile, to achieve best colour results. What does this mean? In your editing software choose RGB as the working space, and assign the image profile as sRGB (full name sRGB IEC61966-2.1)
For most of our fabrics, there is no limit on the length of the fabric that you can order. We have a preview design window set up to 10m max to visualise the print, but that's not a print limit. If you'd like to order more, increase the quantity (x2 for 20m or x4 for 40m for example) and then you can order as much as you'd like, with a built-in automatic volume discount too. The maximum print width of each fabric can be found on the individual fabric pages or in our design interface.
Yes, that might help you! Always incorporate any extra space or boarders into your purchased fabric size. We trim squarely around fabric samples and fabric prints, leaving approximately 5mm white space. Cutting neatly on the line has an additional fee.
Crocking, which is fading along the creases, often after washing or heavy use, occurs when you digitally print on natural fabrics - more so when dark or dense colours are used. It can be minimised by using a cool hand wash instead of machine washing as the tumbling of the machine is the main cause of this. To avoid entirely, we would advise using a poly fabric.
Our organic fabrics do not have any coatings that the non-organic fabrics have. This means the ink absorbs into the fibres, reducing the colour strength slightly (by approx. -40%). For super strong colours we recommend a non-organic natural fabric.
Unfortunately not; we like to test meticulously so that we know what gets best results on our fabrics, and our facilities cater perfectly to them. We do however print sublimation paper to order, and if you have access to a heat press you can press your own fabrics easily.
For multi-coloured or very detailed files we recommend using a tiff format, but they must be flattened. For simple colours and low detail files, a jpeg is fine.
Just like many fabric printing processes, there is the potential for shrinkage. Depending on the fabric, please expect and allow between 2-8% shrinkage which you need to plan for in your dimensions. This percentage can vary from print run to print run and between fabrics, so we would advise ordering a little more material than you require for your project.
We do not offer to print on both sides of the fabric. A lot of our fabrics are semi-transparent or have some show through and this wouldn't work with double-sided printing. This is not a service that we offer on any of our fabrics.
At the moment no, our labels are all printed on the same satin fabric. We may introduce more in the future, but for now, this is the best choice. The labels are all cut the same way. You can order the fabric of your choice and make the labels yourself, but we do not cut different fabric into label format.
With environmental consciousness in mind, our fabrics are all printed using completely water-based inks. This means no chemicals or solvents are used. Our heat fixing procedure fixes the colours and prints, avoiding the downsides of steaming, such as excess or contaminated water returning into the waste system. We have one facility in London where we conduct all the printing, production and fulfilment. Rather than roll the fabrics, or send them in a tube, we fold them before they are sent out to you. This saves over 150 tubes a week, as well as a lot of space on the delivery van. (For delicate fabrics we ensure to package appropriately).
We work at improving our colour profiles all the time. Though rare it may happen that from one print run to another, and there could be slight colour differences, this is normal and part of the process when we are constantly improving. It is extremely unlikely that there will be a huge difference (like orange instead of red for example). Please bear in mind such colour variations can be intensified from fabric to fabric due to the varying grains and textures of the fabric; natural fabrics tend to have more muted colours than their poly alternatives. This is due to the construction of the materials as well as the print methods that have to be altered slightly for more delicate, natural textiles.
We have a full Cut & Sew service here at Bags of Love, and are able to hem your fabric prints for a small additional charge. We create a small one- or two-fold hem that typically uses 5 to 20mm of material, depending on the thickness of the fabric. So, for example, if you want a finished piece of fabric that measures 100 x 100cm, you will need to order a size of 101.5cm x 101.5cm to allow for the hem (on top of that please also allow for shrinkage of min 2%). The thicker the fabric, the bigger the hem will be. You can choose to have your prints hemmed with either Black or White thread. On our silk and other light woven fabrics, one hemmed edge will be straight (vertically down the roll) and the other will be slightly rippled. The hemming material allowances are as follows and you need to make your print bigger to accommodate the hem:
For further information about our fabrics see our FAQs.
Please note: As everything we provide is handmade to order, you may find a slight variance in the sizes.
