Dye sublimation printed shirts have started to become rather popular, sublimation tends to makes the t shirts more wearable and comparably soft. Dye sublimation printer is basically a computerized printer that turns the printed image, mirror reverse, in the form of gas and with the use of heat transfers the gaseous dye on the cloth giving the print ‘a no hand feel’. This process makes the most vivid and real images to be printed on the t shirts. Due to the benefits of this process people tend to have more of these shirts, and there comes the need of the question of whether one can print t shirts using the dye sublimation.
The material of the t shirt should be chosen really carefully, experimentation has been done on various kinds of material as in natural fibers and mixed natural fibers. But the best results were on polyester because sublimation dyes give brighter colors on polyester than on any other fiber. In order to understand whether printing is executable or not, one has to understand how the sublimation dyers work.
The printer needed to print t shirts is Epson printer which is to be filled with sublimation paper and ink as well as a heat press machine. Then, the first one has to do is to choose the text or the image one wants to print on the tee and print t from the computer. Followed by setting the heat press machine to 190 degrees one should be sure of placing the image or text upside down. After that one has to use medium pressure which would imprint the image onto the cloth. When this chain is completed, the sublimation paper should be removed. The heat acts as the catalyst in this process which turns the image into gas. The dye used in ht process is fade resistant and hence lasts for many years or so. The dye used is commonly referred as CMYO ink (cyan magenta yellow overprint).
There is certain chemistry to the dye, the heat while transforming the dye into gas