The impact of printable interlining printing pattern on hand value of wool fabrics

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The printable interlining technique directly prints the adhesive onto the garment, without needing a separate interlining. Previous research identified the optimum printing conditions concerning squeegee frequency, screen mesh, and agent viscosity, to achieve the best hand value for the wool fabrics. The selection of the printing pattern is one of the most important factors influencing the manufacturing and characteristics of the finished fabric. Therefore, theoretically printing patterns could potentially affect the most important human experiential characteristics of the fabric–hand value. In this work, utilizing both the existing and newly developed printing patterns, we systematically investigated the effect of printing pattern on the hand value of wool fabrics that are of different weights. The results showed that overall, the lightweight fabric has lower values in the categories of stiffness, smoothness, and fullness and softness given identical pattern compared with medium weight fabrics. However, lightweight fabric's THV was uniformly higher than the medium weight fabric. Lightweight fabric's primary hand values were less sensitive to variations in printing density compared to the medium weight fabric. Regardless of fabric weight, the dot-based patterns were on average the best performing wool fabrics in terms of low stiffness, high smoothness, high fullness and softness, and high THV. This indicates that to achieve the best overall hand value, the dot-based printing pattern was preferable to the solid or stripe patterns. Pattern direction, specifically the direction of stripes, had in most cases negligible effect on hand value performance. These findings imply that for future designs that achieve great overall hand value using printable interlining on wool fabrics, dot-based printing patterns should be adopted, which has the added advantage of less printing agent consumption.