Printing on burlap?

[Aaron Gein]

A couple good friends of mine own a coffee house and roastery. They're starting to have a table at our local farmers market every weekend and want to print a sign for their booth on burlap coffee bean bags. I know this can be done...there is already printing on the bags from the farmers and distributors, etc. Has anyone printed on burlap? I'm thinking water based ink would probably be better than plastisol...water based would really soak in to the fibers. Low mesh count? 110? 86? Any other suggestions or bits of wisdom?

[ricv64]

wash them first or you'll get bits of bag all over you

[Delicious]

Steve Walters would know and he doesn't recommend it.

[Andymac]

soft squeegee, padded platten. They use a dye in India, but any crap waterbased textile ink (speedball) would work, the ink should have some body while printing so it doesn't run all over, but not as thick as plastisol. Coarse mesh, chunky art.

[bathroom monkey]

Geoff knows how to print on pillowcases, maybe that will help.

[NeroInferno]

Any water based transparent ink will give the effect you are looking. Probabily will be necessary to wash the burlpa before printing, to remove any chemical used to create it.

Another solution is DYES!! Sodium Alginate+Dye. Consider there are 2 main dyes catagorie, reactive and not reactive ones. If you buy the reactive ones you must wash the burlap, adding a very strong alkaline soda without rinsing in water to make bond the dye to the fiber. The other dyes bonds with heat. You could try to contact by phone Dharma Trading, perhaps they can help you. If you are interested in reactive dyes knowledge there are some VERY interesting books by Ann Johnston. Check on her website, she's a very good woman, and answers to your emails too. I believe you should read the Ann Johnston books about dyes also if you are looking for not reactive dyes.

Finally the result of a printed dye is the same using waterbased transparent ink.

If you want to save time, go for water based inks..I'll suggest to add catalyst in the ink considering the burlap bags are treated not like a tshirt.

wow.
Fabio

[Aaron Gein]

Thanks for the advice everyone. Padded platen is a great idea. Now to figure out a cheap material to pad with....pretty sure there isn't a huge budget for this sign and I probably wont be doing a ton more burlap printing after this...so cheap and ghetto is how I'm going to have to go! Really thin, dense carpet padding maybe?

Andy, how coarse is coarse? Over here in t-shirt land the coarsest mesh I've used is 86 for some metallics and high density ink. But that would normally be too coarse for waterbased.....maybe not in this case though? 110? 156?

[squeegeethree]

We use 76 mesh with WB inks all the time.

[Aaron Gein]

We use 76 mesh with WB inks all the time.

Must be fairly thick WB inks? It seemed to me like most water based would pour through mesh that coarse.

[squeegeethree]

We print all different viscosities of inks. If you are hesitant order some AreoTex from Union which tends to be pretty thick.