What Is Sublimation
As a dye sublimation specialist, we get a lot of questions each week on the topic of what is sublimation? Today I’m going to go through some of the basics on what is sublimation
Dye Sublimation is a process where specialized printers are used to employe a printing process that uses heat to transfer dye onto materials such as a plastic, card, paper, or fabric. Special sublimation inks are printed onto special sublimation transfer papers. Once printed, an industrial heat press is used to “gas” the image onto the garment.
What Is Sublimation
Dye Sublimation first became available as a garment decorating method in the early 1980’s. It was then and is today only available for decoration on polyester garments. Sometimes blended polyester, rayon, nylon can be used, but the higher the pure polyester content, the better the results and more vivid the colors. When sublimation printing became available in the early 80’s wearing 100% polyester garments was not in fashion. People at that time thought of “leisure suits” as a fashion disaster.
Today, companies like Under Armour, Nike, Adidas and others have made wearing 100% polyester fashionable. They call this fabric wicking, or performance or technical. It’s kind of funny because Polyester is plastic, but that’s a topic for another day. So when you are questioning what is sublimation, it is simply the process of printing with special inks to a transfer paper, and then heating that image to a specific temperature at which point it turns into a gas. That gas is then transfered into the polyester fabric “dyed” and becomes permanent.
With sublimation printing all of the inks are opaque and there is no white. So all garments that are dye sublimated need to start out as a white garment first and then the white is dyed.
Most professional dye sublimation occurs at the point where the garment is just fabric. Bolts or rolls of polyester fabric are dye sublimated and then cut and sewn into garments.
Recently, advances have been made in dye sublimation of pre-sewn items. T-Shirts are now being sublimated after the fact i.e. they have already been made into a t-shirt.
If you have been asking the question What Is Sublimation? Or, you are interested in starting your own line of dye sublimated t-shirts, please consider giving us a call. We would be happy to walk you through the process, review your designs and get you started on your journey of launching your custom line of dye sublimated t-shirts.
You can reach us at (908) 806-8337 or email.
What Is Sublimation