Woven Blankets

Our woven blankets are crafted from 100% cotton yarn for a soft, warm, and luxurious feel.

Our system and method of printing enable you to weave your photos and graphic designs into these high-quality and cozy blankets. We created this guide to help you prepare your artwork design for weaving on our woven blankets. Follow the tips, tricks, and recommendations below to ensure your custom woven products are as accurate as possible to your original artwork.

The process of creating custom woven blankets uses solid colored yarn in combination with black and white yarn to achieve your desired colors for your product. We can achieve 195 possible color combinations using this method, and this is beneficial as it allows you to work with so many different color combinations when creating your product.

• We recommend creating your design with photographs as you can use our system and colors to create pleasing woven renditions.
• Graphic designs and images using gradients are a much more complex process to weave onto the product. When using graphic designs as your image and going through the woven process, your product may come out differently from your original artwork design.

We recommend creating product previews of your finished woven blanket with your original artwork to help set expectations for your customers. To accomplish the effect of a woven blanket preview, we encourage you to reduce the saturation of the reds and greens on your product preview image and reduce the artwork's resolution down to 12 dpi before any manipulation of the artwork.

There are three primary areas that you should consider when preparing your images for weaving. 

1. Colors
2. Gradients
3. Resolution

Colors

By combining the Red, Blue, Green, Gold, White, and Black yarns, we can produce woven blankets with 195 different perceived colors, and you can view the palette below. There are no vibrant, hot, neon, or intense yellow colors out of the possible 195 color combinations.

If you look at the example below, the background color of the original artwork is an orange-red color, and this is not a color that is available on our 195 color combination palette. While going through the woven process, it will automatically replace the colors with the closest option, and the result is a different background color that is more yellow-orange. The end product won't be able to match the vibrancy of the original design.

In the below example, you run into the same issue in that the weaving process cannot match the hot and vibrant colors. So during the process, it's automatically selecting the closest color on the palette. Also, since some of the colors in the original design are very close together, you may run into large blocks of a single woven color where multiple colors exist in the original graphic.

Gradients

Working with gradients can even be more challenging when to comes to creating woven products. Any photos or graphics that contain large transitioning color fields can cause the most issues. Since we're working with only a 195 color combination palette, your finished product will once again only contain the nearest color match according to your submitted image.

The images below show a subtle color change from dark to light purple, and you can see the difference in the finished woven product as there's no exact color match for the purple color in our palette.

Resolution

When creating woven products, you'll be working with woven stitches and not pixels when creating your artwork design. These woven stitches do not directly translate to pixels, making it difficult to get an idea of your finished product.

To get a good idea of your finished product, we recommend converting your image to the full size (50”x 60”) at 12 dpi. 

The example below shows detailed and small cracks in the original design, but those details do not show up on the finished woven blanket since the details are too small for the stitching to produce compared to the pixels when creating your design. Please keep this in mind as you create your designs for woven products.

Creating artwork in Photoshop or another image editing software

1. Set up your print area according to the size of the blanket you’d like to create. If you plan on offering multiple sizes, use the most prominent print area to create your artwork.

2. Set up your guidelines in photoshop 2 inches from the border. 

You do this so that any necessary design elements, like text, are inside those guidelines. This area is where the threads of the woven blanket are frayed around the edges.

3. Save your artwork as an RGB, JPG, or PNG file at max file size.

Tips and tricks to remember

• Use high contrasting bold colors and avoid bright or vibrant colors to get a finished product that closely resembles your original artwork. We recommend checking to see that your colors match our 195 color combination palette.
• Avoid using large color fields as a background, and any artwork with busy backgrounds with little attention to detail typically is produced well.
• Use large and bold text whenever possible. We recommend avoiding having fine details in your artwork as these reproduced well when stitched. These woven blankets are large and designed to be viewed from a distance, so it makes more sense to use larger and bolded text.