Up till now I have been making my own T shirt designs and printing using submlimation inks and heat press.
I want to move away from submlimation printing for T shirts but am a little confused about the best way to produce transfers that won't disappear when the T shirt is washed.
I'd appreciate some advice on the following :
what transfer paper and inks I should use?
what is best hot or cold peel ?
I use a Knight heat press and an Epson 1290 printer (and I'm in the UK)
Simple.. print with pigment ink. Dye ink will fade on you. Are you using an Epson printe. If not I suggest you give the C88 a try. I use Iron all transfwer paper for all my lights. I have washed my own shirts dozens of time and the print is still there..
I was just curious what some of the reasons are that you want to move away from sublimation printing for t-shirts?
As far as inks and papers go, you should use the Epson Durabright pigmented inks, or switch to the Magic Mix inks (recommended) or some other pigmented ink brand. There seems to be many recommended transfer papers from the members here, but the most popular are probably the Transjet II papers, also known as Magicjet depending on where you buy them. Transjet and Magicjet are the same paper.
I guess the durabrite ink isn't the standard ink supplied with printer.
I want to move away from sublimation and T shirts because of of the limitation of using 50/50 cotton poly blends to print on. Sublimation printing is great apart from this one drawback. I'd like to open my options to 100% cotton T shirts.
Hi greenday I am a former epson rep. here is a list of the Epson printers that come with pigment ink. c68 ($60.) C88 ($80) R1800 Large format ($400) R800 ($550) R2400 large format ($850). The rest are Dye printers.Now you may see other number floating around here but a lot the printers have been discontinued. You can go to epson.com and see if they have older models printers at the epson store that are refurbished. You might even find some at ebay, but and there is always a but, becareful in buying a used printer. Printers have a life and the print heads only last for so long. All in all the pigment inks will not fade and are water resistant. Your shirts will go through many wash cycles unlike a dye ink. Hope this helps.
Also, if you are planning on using a bulk ink system, you can get pigmented inks for the R300-R320 series and maybe a few more models, even though they come stock with die based inks.
Peels, Paper and ink 
