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Mar 21

5 Easy Steps to Designing and Printing Lampshade Fabric

Did you know that we can help you turn your original designs into lampshade panels? Our digital printing service means that your artwork, pattern design or image can be printed onto one of our five textiles, providing you with a bespoke textile design, ready for use with your chosen Lampshade Making Kit. In today's post, we show you how to use our lampshade fabric printing service in 5 easy steps!







 

About Our Lampshade Panel Printing Process  

Our digital printing technology uses Dye-sublimation printing creating full-colour artwork, that works with polyester and polymer-coated substrates. This process gives vibrant, impactful graphics to suit a wide range of applications, resulting in beautiful and permanent colours that are embedded in the substrate or fabric, rather than printed on the surface.


Lampshade Shapes for Printing

Our in-house Fabric Printing Service and Lampshade Panel Printing Service means your designs can be printed onto five types of fabrics, that work with our most popular Lampshade Making Kits that are listed below:



If you require a bespoke lampshade panel printing for any of our other kits, or ringsets our Printing Team would be only too happy to help.




5 Easy Steps to Designing and Printing Lampshade Fabric


Step 1 - Design the artwork for your fabric


Create your artwork or design in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. For printing fabrics our

preference is for High-Resolution PDFs, yet we also accept JPG, TIFF, and EPS & AI file types.


Professional Lampshade maker Alison Bick uses Illustrator to create her beautiful floral designs, as pictured below and you can read more about Alison's design process for printing lampshade fabric panels in our blog post here.




Step 2 - Use our template dimensions

Once you’ve designed your artwork, to ensure this will work for your chosen size of lampshade we recommend using our bespoke lampshade printing templates.  


For example, to print a fabric panel for a 30cm Drum lampshade making kit, your artwork needs to be 967mm wide x 248mm high. This size includes bleed and the allowance for the rolled edge and seam.


You can find all of our Lampshade downloadable template sizes below and on the product pages below:


Drum Lampshades by Lesley Johnson - www.lesleyjohnsonart.com

Step 3 - Pick a fabric  

Our specialist range of hand picked textiles provide excellent print quality at affordable prices and have all the best attributes to make great lampshades. Select the fabric that you wish your design to be printed on from the drop-down selection menu above the file submission button, on your chosen lampshade size.


To help you choose, here’s what we feel each fabric offers:  


Perfect for manufacturing Lampshades, our Polytextile features a plain weave texture and all important inherent flame retardant properties. Easily our most popular fabric for lampshade printing, due to it being lightweight and easy to work with, it also retains a high-quality, vibrant print and an overall matt finish, that is identical on both sides.

 


Manufactured in the UK, our 100% Natural Cotton has a tightly woven surface that although extremely taut has variations on the fibre creating a subtle yet visible surface pattern. The print finish is a soft, slightly muted print with warm undertones, and brighter colours print subtly due to the natural cotton fibres, creating a long-lasting print, whilst the fabric retains its original bleached white colour.

 


Textured with a diverse fibre base of varying slubs, our linen has a soft matte finish and a just visible sheen. We use eco-friendly sublimation inks which allow the colours to sink deep into the fabric fibres, resulting in a crisp, clear print quality and a gorgeous all-over finish. In addition, our Linen is extremely durable, resisting damage from abrasion and has a lower likelihood of piling or having lint build-up.



Luxurious, chic and versatile our decadent velvet is ideal for lampshades due to its short, dense pile that is soft and sleek to the touch, making to the perfect way to elevate your lampshade designs. Our sublimation printing process creates a high-definition print with sharp clear details and a consistent print, which has a softened quality from the velvet’s textured matte surface that has a very slight shine.



With a lustrous and even sheen, our Satin Fabric is silky smooth and when printed this opaque fabric, produces fine details and excellent colour reproduction, with the bright white base cloth creating a bold contrast and a crisp finish. Composed of highly twisted filament yarn it’s soft-to-the-touch, with a textured, matte finish on the reverse.

 




If you’re unsure, why not order a FREE Printable Textiles Sample Pack, that contains the fabric mentioned above, so you choose the right fabric for your lampshade design.  





Step 4 - Send your files

Files can be sent to us by clicking on the ‘Choose File’ button at the top of you chosen lampshade size page. If you would like to add any further details or information about your work, please use the text box underneath the file submission button.


And if the file is too large for standard file submission, please use this link and follow the instructions.




Step 5 - Purchase your Lampshade Making Kit

Once you’ve uploaded your design, simply add your choice of Lampshade Making Kit to your basket, to make stunning bespoke lampshades, like out wonderful print customers below!




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