Silk
Silk Fabric Guide
100% real silk satin at 90 gsm, printed with acid dye — and an honest look at when a polyester satin will serve you better.
Print quality
What reactive printing does to the colour
The dye bonds with the cotton fibre instead of sitting on top of it as a film. That is where the depth comes from — and why the printed area stays as soft as the unprinted area.
Before you order
See it on real fabric first
You do not have to commit to a full run to find out how a fabric feels or how your colours come out.
Every quality we print, unprinted, on one card set. The quickest way to judge weight, handle and opacity.
Order the swatch pack — €9.00Cotton and viscose qualities go through a different print process, so the smallest run of your design is 5 metres — you can order that straight from the fabric page. The swatch pack covers the fabric itself.
Order 5 m with your designThe range
The one quality we print in this family
Real silk, and when it is worth it
We print one genuine silk: 100% real silk satin at 90 gsm. It is the lightest, most fluid cloth in our range, with the particular cool handle and deep, shifting lustre that only the protein fibre produces. Nothing synthetic reproduces the way silk warms to the skin or the way light travels across it as it moves.
It is also the most expensive metre we sell, it has a 5 m minimum, and it takes the longest to produce. So the honest question is whether the project needs silk or needs the look of silk.
Needs silk
Anything that will be handled and judged as a material in its own right: a scarf sold as a silk scarf, a lining in a tailored jacket, a piece of clothing where the buyer will read the composition label. Also anything worn next to sensitive skin — silk is a smooth, protein-based fibre and is genuinely gentler than a synthetic filament.
Needs the look of silk
If what you want is drape, sheen and vivid colour, our matte polyester satins at 70 and 128 gsm and the silky polyester crepe at 80 gsm will get you most of the way for a fraction of the cost — with a 1 m minimum, a week's production instead of three, and more saturated colour, because sublimation on polyester carries more pigment than acid dye on silk.
How silk is printed
Silk needs acid dye, not the reactive dye we use on cotton or the sublimation we use on polyester. The protein fibre bonds to a different dye chemistry. Printed, steamed and washed, the colour becomes part of the fibre — the cloth stays as soft afterwards as it was before, which is the whole point of dyeing silk properly rather than coating it.
Acid printing is the slowest process we run. Allow two to three weeks in production, plus your proof approval.
Working with it
- Minimum 5 m per design.
- It is slippery. Cut it in a single layer on a large surface, weight it rather than pinning through it, and use a fine needle — a 60/8 or 70/10 — with fine thread.
- Finish every edge. At 90 gsm it frays readily. French seams or a rolled hem.
- Care. Hand wash cool or dry clean, dry out of direct sun, press on the reverse with a cool iron.
- Order a swatch first. At this price point, feeling the cloth before committing 5 m is the cheapest decision you will make.
Keep reading
The other fabric guides
Before you commit
Feel it first
A swatch pack lets you judge the hand and the weight yourself. A €5.00 test print goes further — it puts your own design on the quality you picked, printed on the same machine as a full order.
