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For a recent interior design project, Ty Pennington and his design team at "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" (the ABC Television remodeling show) came to First2Print a NYC-based wide-format digital fabric printing services output provider, to help with one of its design projects.
First2Print was called in to digitally print custom textile patterns used to redesign several rooms in the home of a selfless family who took custody of their relatives' five young children orphaned by their parents' death. The design team for "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" came to First2Print to save time and still be able to create a custom design as unique as the family in need.
There are those who overcome tragedy and still manage to do good for others. Such was the case for one of the family members who as a young adult and child-cancer survivor has been nationally recognized for collecting pop tabs to raise money for juvenile cancer patients. As an inspiration to the designers, the pop-tab theme was the design foundation for creating a bedroom ensemble consisting of pillow shams, curtains, and bed covering in one of the bedrooms.
"We couldn't help but be inspired by this family, and creating something custom and special around the 'pop-tab' theme was something unique that we wanted to give back to them," said Ty Pennington, team leader of the "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" design team. "I just wasn't sure we could create custom fabrics to match our design idea in such a short time. We had never worked with digitally printed textiles before, and the benefit of working with a company with so much design and print knowledge as First2Print was that they immediately understood the project, knew how to match the colors we needed, and were able to give us unique textiles to create something really distinctive for our showcase family."
"We were honored to work for such a worthy cause and work with such a formidable design team as the one on 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,'" said Tina Wagner, project manager for First2Print. "What made this project unusual was the exceptionally short time frame. We really had to work closely with the 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition' design team to pick the right fabric that would be functional and beautiful, as well as durable enough to be in the bedroom of a home. In addition, our digital printing process needed to match the textile colors from concept to final short-run production yardage—all within just a few days."
With color as the foundation of inspirational interior design, digital-printing services from First2Print can unlock home décor doors to render unlimited colors and images for short-run yardage of fabrics, for everything from bedding to drapery to upholstery and flooring.
Typically, textile designs are constrained to six or a maximum of twelve colors, yet with digital printing, millions of colors are achievable, and customization is a snap.
Interior designers, artists, and manufacturers of home furnishings and décor products have previously struggled with designing, purchasing, or producing 3,000 yard minimums of custom prints. With materials and digital fabric print services from First2Print, the creation of textile prints with just a minimum of five yards for production fabric is now practical. In addition, First2Print's services make photographic imagery possible and eliminate traditional spot-color and screen-separation restrictions.
For this project, First2Print digitally printed pre-treated fabrics from DigiFab Systems for several of the makeover rooms. For the pop-tab theme room with two color-ways of green and blue, a cotton sheeting was used. It was ideal for the pillow shams, curtains and bedcovers of the room. For another room on a different "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" show, First2Print printed on poly micro fiber which was chosen for its soft peach finish and feel—perfect for a softer more feminine decor.
Both projects were printed using a Dupont Artistri printer with pigment inks on the cotton sheeting and disperse inks on the poly micro fiber.
All textiles were post-processed with a DigiFab Heat Press, then washed, dried, and ironed for delivery to the "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" design and production team, which sewed the yardage into final goods.