Print + tree
The name came before almost everything else.
Print, because that is the work: taking an image — a photograph, a painting, a pattern drawn on a Sunday — and putting it onto cloth so it can be lived with.
Tree, because every yard we make began as something that grew. Cotton is a plant. Linen is a plant. We wanted a name that would keep reminding us of that, even on the days when the work is mostly files and color profiles.
Your photographs and your art, woven into how you live. On fabric for your walls, your table, your everyday. That is still the whole idea.
Daegu
Our fabric is printed in Daegu, South Korea, the city that has been the center of Korea's textile industry for more than half a century. We work inside the Daegu Dyeing Industrial Complex in Seo-gu, a district built for one thing: dyeing and finishing cloth. Steam, water, and the people who know how to use them, gathered in one place.
The factory has been printing cotton for thirty years. We don't weave it — the raw cloth comes to us from mills we choose ourselves, selected for how it takes dye: the weight, the weave, the way it drinks color. Everything after that is ours. Pre-treatment, printing, steaming, washing, tentering, inspection. When a yard leaves Daegu, we know what happened to it at every step, because we did it.
RealFabric is the name we print under. Printree came to the United States in 2020, built for people ordering one yard, on a simple idea: that one yard of your own design deserves the same care as a thousand yards of anyone else's.
Dye, not paint
Most on-demand printing sits on the surface of the fabric. Ours goes into it.
We print with reactive dyes, which form a bond with the cotton fiber itself. Then we do the three things that take the most time and are easiest to skip. We steam the fabric, so the dye sets. We wash it, so anything that didn't bond is gone before the fabric reaches you. We tenter it — dry it under tension on a frame that pulls it back to its true width, so it lies flat and even. What is left is a print you feel through the cloth rather than on top of it — soft in the hand, flat on the table, and still itself after the fiftieth wash.
Every fabric we print on, and the dye we print with, is Oeko-Tex® certified — which matters when the cloth is going to become a baby's blanket, or a dress worn against the skin.
Natural fibers first
Cotton is where we are best, because it is where we started: plain weave, twill, gauze, oxford, canvas, and linen. We also print on real silk — a 16-momme twill and a 10-momme charmeuse — for the designs that deserve it.
We keep a small range of polyester bases for the projects that need stretch, drape, or water resistance, and each one is labeled as what it is.
One yard at a time
Nothing here is printed before you order it. Digital printing lets us do that: no screens to engrave, no minimum run, no bolt of someone else's leftover pattern waiting to be sold. It also uses far less water and dye than the screen printing our industry grew up on, though it is not waterless. We steam and we wash, because that is what makes the color last.
Printing in units is slower than pulling fabric off a shelf. Your order is printed, steamed, and washed, and every order is looked over by a person before it ships. It reaches you in about fourteen business days, tracked the whole way.
If your project needs fabric by Friday, we are honestly not the right printer for it. If you want it done properly, we would like to be.
The people we print for
Quilters. Garment sewists. Small brands sampling a first collection. Someone printing a grandmother's handwriting onto a tea towel, or a child's drawing onto a pillow that will outlast the drawing.
Some of those orders are a fat quarter and some are forty yards. They go through the same hands, the same steam, the same wash. To the person who placed the order, they are the same thing. So they are to us.
Long Island City
Our office is in Long Island City, New York. It is where your order ships from, and where every question about a file, a fabric, or an order is answered — here, by us, not by a call center somewhere else. If you're nearby and want to talk through a project, write ahead, and we'll make the time.
