Road to Sublimation: Sublimating to Cotton

Why is cotton a constant candidate for sublimation decorating? First, cotton is the go-to fabric in other forms of decorating such as screen printing and modern direct-to-garment printing. Second, compared to the polyester options available for dye-sub, cotton shirts have a lower cost and are readily available in thousands of different styles from seemingly hundreds of garment vendors. Third, most customers simply prefer cotton.

As far as I know, it is impossible to directly sublimate to cotton using traditional sublimation dyes and release papers. Why? The dyes, officially called “disperse dyes,” need to bond with an oil-loving molecule like polyester. This stumbling block has forced folks to search for a way to either break or at least work around the laws of physics when it comes to sublimating onto cotton. I have tested a number of promising and sometimes unusual methods that involved either coating the cotton with polyester or modifying the release paper. In my opinion, all of these methods had fatal flaws. Until now.

Click here to read the full PDF article.