Do any of our more artistic members know anything about printing on silk, particularly in detail? I've given up trying to find a place where I can buy modern maps of parts of the US that are similiar in size and construction to old style "escape maps", and I'm thinking about just trying to make my own. I'd start with cotton first, but I was thinking that if I could get it good enough, maybe move up to silk.

The problem is, I don't have any idea what is needed. I know I don't want to mess with the ink jet iron on stuff, it sucks in almost every regard.

Re Ironraven

It is actually quite complicated to print on Silk. I believe that there is no simple way to achieve it using a Personal Computer and commercial inkjet printer. Normally the process that would used would be to produce a print screen negative and then 'pull' though the sceeen the coloured ink on to the silk.

Making the screen print in quite difficult as this would normally mean engraving a wooden or metal block the image of the colour positive image of the map to print onto the screen to produce the screen negative.

To get an accurate screen print using a digitally stored computer map, the lines on the map will have to converted into a set of instructions a milling machine tool will understand, the wooden or metal block will have to be finely machined out using the milling machine tool. The process can be repeated for different coloured lines to produce multiple positive blocks (one for each colour). You could of course do this by hand but the accuracy will be only as good as your engraving skills. The back of Linoleum makes a simple engraving medium in much the same way as the engraved wood or metal block.

A number of screen negatives can then be produced for each line colour using the engraved blocks. Each colour can then be printed using the prepared negative screens onto the silk. Once you have prepared the negative screens you can easily produce multiples of the silk map and sell them on as limited edition map masterpieces in the art of silk screen printing.

Have you taken a look for some of the Topo maps of the area in question that are printed on Tyvek paper. They are pretty indestructable. I have some that were produced by the AMC, and they are waterproof, and pretty much rip proof too. You can fold them neatly, or just stuff them in a pocket, and they don't seem to suffer either way. For you, in VT, I think the Long Trail maps can be had in Tyvek also. The whole area around where the AT goes through VT is on Tyvek too I believe.

I am not artistic but your question intrigues me.

1) Have you tried going to a T-shirt shop? Talk to the owner about scanning the map into their computor/silk screening machine. He will have some idea of how to make it work. The costs will be the issue to contend with.

2) Scan the map into your computor and print it out on the T-shirt iron-on transfers that you can get at WallyWorld, Office Depot etc . Then iron it on a handkerchief, scarf, T-shirt, etc.

I hope this helps. I think I will try this when I get home. Thanks for the idea/concept.

I've done a lot of custom jerseys and other gear for paintball teams, bull riders, sport fishermen, and other athletes and we've used Dye Sublimation to do runs as short as one piece. The cloth is definitely not silk though. The fabric is called "Evapor8" and is a moisture wicking material that is also pile, shrink and fade resistant. Essentially I believe it's a nylon of some sort (I'm on a business trip and can't get my hands on one at the moment to check). We've used the process to print banners, mousepads, and a ton of other things.

Anyway, it's not silk, but it could work.

The drawbacks might be that since it's on such a flexible fabric, the map could be off unless it's laid out completely flat and isn't stretched in some manner, and the fabric like any other nylon, is going to suffer from pinhole burns if you get it too close to the fire and sparks hit it.

I don't want to get kicked off the board for dropping names since I work with a company that does this, but you can Google:
+"Dye Sublimation" +Paintball
and find quite a few places that do this type of work.

I've seen the long trail tyvek map. It doesn't show much OFF the long trail, and that includes most of the state.

I had thought about tyvek sheets as I have access to color lasers easy enough, but tyvek isn't as compact as silk. Or as versatile.

That DOES sound like a possibility, particularly since a big guy's back can be as big as a quad map. I will be looking into that, thanks.

I am getting a program for my computer put out by national geographic to replace an older version. It has topo maps for the entire country. You can adjust the scale making your maps as detailed as you want. With it water proof ink in my printer and water proof paper you can get at most stationary storeso and a lot of sporting goods stores.

I have been wondering about this kind of thing too. My understanding is that it's fairly easy to print onto cotton. You can get special paper sheets that go into a home printer and can then be ironed onto cotton to transfer the image, for about £1 for an A4 sheet as I recall. I have no idea what the resolution is like but I suspect low.

I am in the UK and I am not sure how useful maps would be here. I know my local area already, and a map of the entire country would surely be too low resolution to be useful. In any case if I had to navigate across the UK I'd probably just follow the roads and trust the road signs. Or find a shop or abandoned house and search for maps in there.

The other issue with maps is that detailed ones tend to be local, which limits their usefulness. Other information might be useful to more people, and so worth doing a bigger print run for, which would make it worth using a better, more expensive printing system.

Here's what I did, for a cotton T-shirt:

1 Get your desired image on a PC
2 Convert it to a mirror image
3 Print it onto clear plastic on a laser printer
4 Put a plastic bag inside the t-shirt
5 Pour acetone onto the area of the tshirt where the image is to be fixed
6 Place the plastic sheet from (2) printed side down onto the shirt
7 Put a heavy weight onto the plastic
8 Wait
9 Remove plastic sheet (and plastic bag)
10 Protect the image with a sheet of paper and iron over it

I am sure some web research will support this method, but I actually did it and it worked. Here's some more detail on each point:

1 Pretty easy these days. Choose a black and white image that is very clear. I did this about 15 years ago- we had to draw our own image with Adobe Illustrator on a Mac. Plus ca change.
2 Again, pretty easy. Image software will flip the image for you, or sometimes it is a setting in the printer driver.
3 Make sure you use plastic sheets that are designed for laser printers! The ordinary overhead projector ones will melt! Laser printer images are made by depositing black PVC powder onto the paper, and then heating it to melt it and fix it in place. Obviously this method won't work with inkjets.
4 The plastic bag keeps the front and back layers of the shirt separate.
5 Be careful, acetone is flammable, and has strong vapours!!
6 The acetone will dissolve the PVC powder and release it from the plastic.
7 The weight stops the layers from moving (or you'll get a damaged image)
8 I don't recall how long to leave the sheet on the shirt- experiment.
9 Carefully peel the plastic away- the black toner will stay on the shirt. Take the plastic bag out from inside.
10 Heating the image re-melts the toner and helps it stick to the shirt fibres more.

Good luck. I disclaim all responsibility. If you choose to do this then be careful.

I never tried it on silk, in principle it would work with any material, but I am a bit concerned that acetone will destroy silk (and some other materials too), plus you can't iron some things.

A