Jan 26, 2023

NEW Fabrics - Design and Print your own Lampshade Fabric

Updated: Dec 11, 2023

New for 2023 we’ve extended our lampshade fabric printing range, adding two new high-quality fabrics selected specially to make your bespoke lampshade design stand out from the crowd!

Pick from our new luxurious satin or hardwearing 100% natural cotton, both of which offer different fabric finishes and can be used with our standard sized lampshade panels. Today we’ll introduce you to all of the benefits of printing onto our satin and natural cotton, as well as share the details of our popular linen, poly textile and velvet fabrics which our lampshade makers come back to time and time again.

NEW Satin

Luxurious, silky and smooth are the perfect adjectives to describe our Satin Fabric. With a lustrous and even sheen, this opaque fabric when printed 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.

Uses

Lampshades, soft furnishings such as curtains, cushions and even upholstery, and dressmaking.

NEW 100% Natural Cotton

Manufactured in the UK, our new 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 that print subtly due to the natural cotton fibres, The printing ink sits on the surface of the fabric, creating a long-lasting print, whilst the fabric itself retains its original bleached white colour.

Uses

Lampshades and soft furnishings, such as cushions, homeware accessories, craft and dressmaking projects.

Polytextile

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

Uses

Lampshades, soft furnishings such as lightweight curtains, bed throws or cushions and craft projects.

Linen

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 for printing that allow the colours to sink deep into the fabric fibres, resulting in a crisp, clear print quality and a gorgeous all-over finish.

Uses

Lampshades, soft furnishings such as cushions and homeware accessories and craft projects

Velvet

A decadent and chic fabric, bespoke velvet printing is the perfect way to elevate your lampshade . Our velvet has a short, dense pile that is soft and sleek to the touch, with a reverse which is tightly woven with no pile. 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.

Uses

Lampshades, soft furnishings, including upholstery, homewares and dressmaking and crafting.

About the printing process

Dye Sublimation transfer is a digital printed technology and the first stage is to digitally print your design onto special transfer paper. Using a heated roller press, known as a calendar press, your design is transferred from the paper to the fabric using a combination of time, temperature and pressure. The results are beautiful and permanent colours that are embedded in the substrate or fabric, rather than printed on the surface that won't fade or crack even after multiple washes. The Dye Sublimation process ensures vibrant and impactful printing to suit a wide range of applications.

Not just lampshade printing

As we’ve said our fabric printing isn’t just for lampshades. Want to use your designs to create a range of matching cushions? We can do that too!

For cushion printing we recommend our soft velvet which gives a luxurious quality to your designs so why not consider this when creating your initial lampshade design to extend your product range, by offering matching designs.