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colonial printing press images
Stories on Silk
Look at your tie. Or at curtains, a tablecloth, wallpaper, a summer blouse...
Watch the fabric, and the drawing decorating it. It's not embroidered: it's printed.
Up to now, it's all trivial. What isn't trivial is the story behind the procedure that allows to actually make that printing, and make it so that, when your tie is stained, the color of the stain is taken off by a wash, but the decorations stay vivid and clear. A story that we chose an exceptional narrator for, someone who's been building machines for textile printing for more than sixty years: MS Italy.
The history of textile printing begins, as far as we know, almost two thousand years ago, in China, with silk cloths painted in flowers in three colors, around 200 A.D., and it reaches the Mediterranean area, in Egypt, only two hundred years later. But Asia will anyway remain the undisputed master of textile printing for several centuries, with Indian and Chinese silks deemed as objects of enormous value on European markets. Such printed fabrics are obtained with carved woodblocks, used as stamps and thus pressed, once dipped in color, on the cloth. An efficacious technology never stays still in one place, and it is in the Middle Ages that we find the first examples of similar textile printing being made in Europe, although on fabrics, and especially with dyes, of markedly inferior quality, which are on obstacle to a large market diffusion as washing the printed fabric is impossible, lest the colors run. This limits its application to tapestries and similar decorative objects, which require no washing.
This situation will last for several centuries: it will be the French who finally bring back to their homelands, from their Indian colonies, the techniques for printing fabrics that are wash-resistant, but not before the end of the seventeenth century. Just a few decades later, there will be no European country left where textiles are not printed.
But there still is a long road ahead: extremely beautiful as these printed fabrics are, they require too long a time to be made, and incredible mastery in aligning the woodblocks print after print, so that no interruptions or imperfections appear in the pattern. This is what makes Thomas Bell's invention, in 1785, a true revolution: it is a printing machine based on cylinders (a familiar sight to us, but a totally new and exceptional conception for the times) through which the fabric is pushed, being printed with the pattern engraved on the cylinders themselves. Besides allowing for extremely precise and detailed graphics, in up to six colors (an extraordinary result in itself), Bell's machine conquers the field for its astounding speed: in a ten-hour work day, it can print in one color about ten thousand yards of cloth. It is the clear passage from a craftsman's perspective to an industry's, both from a functional and economic standpoint. And an industry which becomes more and more demanding, until at the beginning of the twentieth century a new technology, one still widely used, is developed: that of screen printing, where color is pressed on the fabric through pre-treated silk screens, thus composing the final image on the cloth.
But our guide in this ride through the centuries also indicates us the most recent of technologies, the one MS Italy is specialized in as a machine builder: that of digital textile printing. Exactly as in the shift from offset printing to digital printing for paper, the digital textile printing technology has allowed for actual revolutions both cost-wise ( not needing specialized screens for every single job makes it economical to print even in low runs) and from an ecological point of view (no special reagents and solvents, which are essential in screen printing and quite polluting, are needed)
And we can continue to enjoy our beautiful, colorful tie!
About the Author
MS Macchine stampa tessile
is specialized in
digital textile printing machines
. To know more, visit their website.
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Press-Printing $49.99 Press-Printing - Giclee Print |
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Printing Press $49.99 Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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Nihilist Printing Press $39.99 Nihilist Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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The Strawberry Hill Press and Its Printing House (Hardcover) $170.77 Horace Walpole`s Strawberry Hill Press, founded in 1757, is the most celebrated of the early English private presses, unique for the importance of the books, pamphlets, and ephemera it produced. This illustrated study of the Press draws on a remarkable array of surviving images of the Printing House, many of them newly discovered and previously unstudied. But more than that, this book provides an original and sustained analysis of Walpole`s extraordinary literary endeavor, and of the complex variety of purposes that the Press fulfilled. The volume not only assesses all known images to discover what they can tell us about Walpole`s Press, but also reveals that, quite unexpectedly, a large part of Walpole`s Printing House survives to this day. |
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Printables Transfer Paper 100 Sheets of 8.5x11 for Printing Color Images from Inkjet Printers on Darker Colored Fabrics using Dry Heat Press or Iron $99 Printables Transfer Paper 100 Sheets of 8.5x11" for Printing Color Images from Inkjet Printers on Darker Colored Fabrics using Dry Heat Press or Iron |
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Huge Mechanical Printing Press $79.99 Huge Mechanical Printing Press - Premium Photographic Print |
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Printing Press by Applegarth and Cowper $49.99 Printing Press by Applegarth and Cowper - Giclee Print |
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Newspaper Printing Press Room $49.99 Newspaper Printing Press Room - Giclee Print |
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Early Printing Press $44.99 English School Early Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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The Invention of the Printing Press $49.99 Neville Dear The Invention of the Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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Mechanical Printing Press $79.99 Mechanical Printing Press - Premium Photographic Print |
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Old-Time Printing Press $24.99 Old-Time Printing Press - Photographic Print |
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Benjamin Franklin's Printing Press $34.99 Benjamin Franklin's Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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Caxton's Printing Press $44.99 Peter Jackson Caxton's Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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Worker Feeds a Printing Machine at a Printing Press in Singapore $39.99 Eightfish Worker Feeds a Printing Machine at a Printing Press in Singapore - Photographic Print |
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French Printing Press, 1642 $34.99 Abraham Bosse French Printing Press, 1642 - Giclee Print |
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Paper Is Placed in the Printing Press $24.99 Heinz Zinran Paper Is Placed in the Printing Press - Photographic Print |
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View of the Printing Press Aboard the Ivernia $39.99 View of the Printing Press Aboard the Ivernia - Photographic Print |
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Semi-Nude Genie with Printing Press $49.99 Semi-Nude Genie with Printing Press - Giclee Print |
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The Printing Press (Paperback) $16.44 Introduces printing and the history of printing technology, from woodblock prints to new technologies in 3-d printing. |
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A View of the Printing Press for the Lassen Advocate $79.99 A View of the Printing Press for the Lassen Advocate - Premium Photographic Print |
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French Printing Press of the 15th Century $34.99 Gerlier French Printing Press of the 15th Century - Giclee Print |
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The Printing Press $29.24 No Synopsis Available |
The United States Army : then - now - forever 1940