Textile printing
The idea of printing images on fabric pre-dates recorded history. The oldest known examples come from East Asia, and involve the use of block printing. A more detailed article on this subject can be found on Wikipedia. This form of textile printing consists of carving a design in a wooden block, which is then used to stamp the design on fabric.
Much later the technique of stenciling was developed. This method had an advantage of more accurately aligned color components. Stencils also had the drawback of being limited in what sort of images they could create. In the eighteenth century rotary printing, with the engraved images placed on a rotating cylinder, immensely accelerated the rate at which printed fabrics could be produced.
Silk screen printing overcame the stencil’s problem of using connecting segments. It has become the single most common method of textile printing because of its versatility. The most recent technique for cloth printing is the use of digital inkjet printers. These machines were originally created for printing on paper, but, because of the manner in which they print, they work very well with fabric.
The inkjet printer used on cloth operates in the same basic fashion as a paper printer, but is considerably more expensive. The basic process consists of creating an image on a computer that is sent to the printer. The printer uses the three primary colors of magenta, cyan, and yellow, along with black and white. The inks are heated in the printer head to change them to liquid form, and then expelled as droplets at the fabric.
The digital printer produces sharper images, it also eliminates set-up costs, and can switch from one image to another in virtually no time. A cheaper alternative that is sometimes used is heat transfer sheets in combination with a standard paper inkjet printer. As the cost of the digital textile printer continues to fall, it will be more widely employed in cloth printing.