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Create your own calico fabric printed with your personalised design. Printed calico material is a beautifu...
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Printing on calico gives your fabric a natural, rustic feel; the natural cotton gives a soft print which is slightly muted with warm undertones.
Choose from reactive or pigment printing for your Calico Fabric.
Max Print: 1.47m
Weight: 152gsm
Roll Width: 1.49m
Care instructions
Wash at 30°C
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 such as 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.
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 calico fabric, by one of our expert seamstresses.
Calico printing is done here in our London 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. This will print your personalised design directly onto 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.
All of our fabrics are printed at 200dpi. This works for us as it combines a great quality as we as a good file weight. In order to avoid resizing and interpolation, we recommend that you scale your image to 100% at 200dpi. Our design interface works with a traffic light system that acts as a quality marker for your designs. This will show you whether the resolution is too low for printing. When you re-upload your design with a highest resolution, the traffic lights will change colour, showing you're good to go. A message will pop up alongside the traffic lights to let you know if the resolution is too low or if you have a good quality image.
Your uploaded design will automatically be scaled to fit the size of fabric you've chosen. You can change the dimensions of your fabric by amending the measurements on the ‘Product Options’ tab, under ‘Print Size’. To see how this fits with the dimensions of your image/design, you can refer to the ‘Images & Text Tools’ tab under 'Quality Information'. Here, you will be able to edit the dimensions of the image.
We always recommend using an RGB colour space when you upload your images. More specifically, we suggest using the sRGB image profile, to achieve best colour results. This will need to be done in your editing software; choose RGB as the working space, and assign the image profile as sRGB (full name sRGB IEC61966-2.1)
There is no length limit for most of our fabrics. Our preview design window is set up to displaying a maximum of 10m to help you visualise the print, but that doesn't mean this is the print limit. If you'd like to order more, you can increase the quantity (x2 for 20m or x4 for 40m for example) and order as much as you'd like. Larger volumes will receive an automatic discount too. While the fabric length is nothing to worry about, each individual fabric will have a maximum width side: These can be found on the fabric's page information or in the design interface.
Yes, that will help you when it comes to cutting or framing your printed fabric. We recommend always adding a little extra space for borders into your purchased fabric size. When we print your materials, or send out fabric samples, we typically trim squarely around the fabric, leaving approximately 5mm white space. Cutting neatly on the line has an additional fee.
Crocking is the term used to describe fading along the creases in a fabric. It typically can occur after constant washing or heavy use of digitally printed natural fabrics. Crocking can be minimised by hand washing your fabrics at a cooler temperature, rather than machine washing. If you want to make sure there's no chance of crocking, we'd suggest you use a poly fabric.
Yes, our organic fabrics don't have an additional coating like non-organic fabrics have, which means it absorbs the inks deep into its fibre and reducing the colour strength slightly (this can be approximately -40%). If you would like a bolder, more vibrant colour for your fabric, we would suggest using a non-organic fabric.
Unfortunately not; all of our fabrics have been tested meticulously to ensure we know exactly how to get the best results, and our facilities cater perfectly to them. If you are set on a fabric we don't offer, we can offer custom printed sublimation paper to order which will allow you to heat press your designs onto your own fabrics.
If your design is simple and less intricate, a JPEG will be absolutely fine. However, if you have created a design with multi-coloured detailing, we would recommend saving your design in a TIFF format.
Similar to other fabric printing processes, shrinkage can occur. The amount of shrinkage will depend on the fabric, but as a general rule of thumb, please allow for 2-8% shrinkage when working out your measurements. Shrinkage is not an exact science, and the amount of shrinkage will vary from print run to print run. We'd always suggest order a little more than you need for your project.
Many of the fabrics we offer are semi-transparent, so printing on both sides of the fabric is not a service we offer.
At the moment, all of our fabric labels are printed on satin fabric. For now, we believe this is the best choice, but will potentially introduce other options in the future. All labels are cut to the same label format. If you would like to choose a different fabric and format for your labels, you could always order a sheet of the fabric of your choice to create labels yourself.
Our fabrics are printed with water-based inks as environmental consciousness is always front of our minds. Water-based inks include no chemicals or solvents, and our printing process uses heat to fix colours and patterns into place to avoid excess or contaminated water returning into the water system (this is something that can occur through steaming). All printing, fulfilment and production is done in our one facility in London, and rather than rolling the fabrics or sending them in a tube, you will receive your material folded up. This amounts to 150 tubes saved a week, as well as much more space on the delivery van for more orders. (For delicate fabrics we ensure to package appropriately).
Although very rare, there could be a slight colour difference from one print run to another. This is a normal part of the printing process, however we are always working to improve our colour profiles. It is unlikely that the difference in print runs will be hugely different (for example, it's unlikely your orange is suddenly going to be red). The likelihood of colour variations can be intensified fabric to fabric due to materials having different grains and textures; natural fabrics typically have more muted colour tones, while poly alternatives have a bolder hue. This is because the construction of the material is different, and the printing method has to be altered slightly for more delicate, natural textiles.
Our full cut & sew service at Bags of Love can be used to your full advantage. We even offer hemming for your fabrics at a small additional cost. Our hems are created with a one or two cold hem that typically uses around 5 to 20mm of fabric (depending on the thickness of your chosen material). Please bare this in mind when you are ordering your printed fabric with hems: If you would like your finished piece to be 100cm x 100cm, change your dimensions to 101.5cm instead to allow space for your hems (you will also need to include additional for potential shrinkage). The thicker the fabric, the bigger the hem will be. Your printed fabric will be hemmed with either Black or White thread. If you are ordering a lightly woven material or a printed silk, you will find that one hem will be straight, while the other 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.
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