Digital print panels
 

I'm seeing lots of breathtaking digital panels lately. I never worked with digital printing on fabric before. How well do they wash and handle while sewing. For some reason I'm thinking inferior to woven fabric, but I'm not sure if that's true or not.

The digital prints I have seen have had a very nice, silky hand. I know of no reason they would be inferior to other fabrics that are printed on.

I used digital printed fabric by Robert Kaufman. I have no complaints about it at all. Beautiful fabric and amazing colors.

I love and use digital prints often. They are certainly not inferior quality. They are right between a batik and a regular quilting cotton I think. Easy to work with and the ones I have had were much straighter than some of the panel prints I’ve dealt with.

It's like anything else- they are as good as the base fabric they used for the process. I've got quite a bit, and more and more often I can't really tell the difference in feel between them and what is not digitally printed. Some of the earlier stuff I got did have a nicer feel, but I paid a lot for that from the designer, and I'm sure she was very picky about the base fabric that was used for her designs.

As to "straight" I've found that is about the same. It all depends on how straight the fabric is going into the printer. Most will appear "straight" until washed and then the fabric relaxes and straightens out if it was pulled off in the printing process.

a fabric manufacturer explained the process to me and said that since the fabric doesn't go through print ink roller (very heavy) for each separate color, it is instead laid down all at one time (think your computer printer) which gives the crispness of the design. I've used a couple and had absolutely no problems.

I saw OBW quilts made using 7 panels. 6 to create the the OBW blocks and center a panel in the quilt. They looked really cool.

You can send your own photos or drawings to “Spoonflower” to get a digital print.