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Your
Definitive Source of Fabrics for Colorfast Dyeing, Printing,
Painting and Stenciling
To Our USITT Clients,
Thank you for investing in your professional career by attending
this conference.
We would like to introduce you to our company,
Testfabrics, Inc., an established textile supplier for over
60 years.
Please don’t let our name mislead you. Yes, we do
produce many special ‘test-fabrics’ for quality
assurance testing of other textiles, but more importantly
for you, we are suppliers of ‘prepared for dyeing,
printing and painting’ textile fabrics for surface
design applications.
Why is this important to technical theater
professionals?
As you know, costume designers and builders and those educators
teaching these subjects often have to dye and paint fabrics
for costume applications. The fabrics normally available
in the fabric stores are not conducive to being dyed or
printed with any degree of colorfastness. The store materials
are already dyed and/or printed and often contain a resin
finish for ‘easy care’ (i.e.: no ironing). Those
‘finishes’ are not made to come off easily and
they block the adherence of any other dyes and paints to
the fabric.
The fabrics from Testfabrics, Inc. are specifically prepared
to accept colorfast textile dyes and paints available from
reputable craft suppliers. Our fabrics have had the ‘sizing’
(usually starch) removed; they have been properly scoured
and where necessary, bleached. Several cotton fabrics have
also been ‘mercerized’, a process that improves
the affinity of those fabrics to absorb more dye and yield
deeper shades.
We stock fabrics from the major fiber groups (cottons, silks,
linens, wools, nylons, polyesters, acetates, acrylics etc)
both in woven and knit styles allowing costume designers
to relate closely to many apparel fabrics. We accept small
orders (from 1 meter and up); we accept school purchase
orders and charge cards for payment. We also provide sourcing
services. We have a great many resources and can often locate
specific fabrics, subject to minimum quantities, on request.
We produce an interesting 8 fiber product, multifiber fabric
#49, a 10 cm (4 inch) wide ribbon with 1 cm stripes of acetate,
bleached cotton, nylon, polyester, acrylic, silk, viscose
and wool. This fabric is extremely useful in teaching dyeing
to students and also for building a dye and textile color
palette of your own. By adding a small piece of this material
to each dyeing you do, it will help you keep track of the
colors possible on other fibers with that dye formulation.
If you would like a sample of this product and additional
information, please let us know.
We also supply materials for digital printing with dyes
and can refer you to studios that provide digital printing
services.
If your group or school is interested in having a guest
lecturer or workshop in textile surface design techniques,
please let us know.
We look forward to hearing from you and to working with
you in your theatrical careers.
What can we do for you?
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