If you are already making T-shirts with an ink jet or color laser printer, you are printing onto a poly-resin coated paper and pressing that onto the fabric. That poly-resin carrier transfers onto the fabric wherever there is transfer paper, whether there is color there or not. All poly-resin carriers have certain characteristics in common:

1. They leave a tactile presence (feel) on the fabric, whether there is color there or not. Some carrier coatings are softer than others once pressed.
2. If pressed on certain colors of fabrics, all carrier coatings will slightly darken the underlying fabric. The better coatings will only darken on colors like gray and blue, while the lesser coatings will darken all colors other than white.
3. Eventually the carrier coatings will allow color to wash out. Better coatings will hold the color much longer than the lesser coatings.
4. Most coatings will eventually begin to darken in the laundering process, making the background "clear" areas visible.

If you want to be able to press color artwork onto a wide array of "light" colored fabrics with zero hand and zero poly-resin carrier to darken, we have good news for you. You can now transfer to 50/50 T-shirts using Okidata laser dye-sublimation toner, Cotton Trans prep spray, dark prep liquid, and laser release paper. The only thing to transfer will be your artwork. This is the only toner or ink with these superior transfer properties that we have found. 

Now you can produce a custom T-shirt using an ash gray (or a myriad of other colors you cannot use today) T-shirt, a sheet of legal (8 ½" by 14") release paper, prep liquid and dye-sublimation toner that washes extremely well, exhibits all the color vibrancy of dye-sublimation colors, and has no other visual or tactile presence. Now imagine that this same finished ash gray T-shirt only costs you $2.60 in direct costs ($1.50 for the shirt, 25 cents for the release paper, about 10 cents worth of prep liquid, and about 75 cents worth of toner) to produce. When you then realize you are using a laser printer that prints 12 - 16 pages per minute, it doesn’t take long to realize you have a gold mine sitting there. Now imagine that you can use that same printer to make coffee mugs, ceramic tiles, license plates, etc and you know this is the solution for you, especially since the printer is available on the Internet for $399.

For questions about this process, contact Walt Watson at (800) 514-3201 or image.solutions@earthlink.net or order a sample by going to the bottom of the page at Okidata Toner.

   We gladly accept VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express.

Send mail to wfwatson@earthlink.net with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: July 14, 2007