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Shrinkage: Why the Second Order’s Print Looks Wrong

A reorder that comes back looking subtly off, from the same screens and the same artwork, is nearly always a cloth problem rather than a printing one.

Raw cotton moves

Three to five percent on the first wash, and it does not move back.

Warp and weft rarely move by the same amount, which is what pulls a print askew.

Batches differ

Two lots of untreated cloth can carry different residual shrinkage.

Same screens, different cloth, different finished bag.

Two honest fixes

Pre-shrunk sanforised cloth, compacted at the mill before cutting.

Or artwork sized with the shrinkage allowed for — which costs nothing.

Decide before the screens

Compensation is trivial to apply at artwork stage and impossible afterwards.

We record the cloth spec and the compensation so batch three matches batch one.

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