Screen Print vs DTG vs Edge-to-Edge Tea Towel Printing

Screen printing is the oldest of the three methods and, for the right design, still the best. Ink is pushed through a mesh stencil directly into the cotton fiber. Each color in your design requires its own screen. The result is a print with clean edges, vibrant color, and a slight tactile presence on the surface — you can feel a well-executed screen print when you run your hand across it.

What screen printing does exceptionally well is produce consistent, bold results across large runs. Once the screens are made, each towel comes out identical. That consistency is exactly what you want if you're supplying a retail account, fulfilling a corporate order, or printing branded towels for an event where every piece needs to look the same.

DTG — direct-to-garment — works like an inkjet printer for fabric. Water-based ink is sprayed directly into the cotton fiber rather than sitting on top of it. There are no screens, no color limits, and no setup costs. A design with 12 colors costs the same to print as one with 2.

This is the method that opened custom tea towel printing to artists. Before DTG, printing a watercolor illustration or a detailed botanical on a flour sack towel was either cost-prohibitive or technically impossible at short runs. DTG changed that. An artist can now test a new design at a single piece, see how it translates to fabric, and scale up once they know it sells — without committing to a minimum run first.

On our flour sack towels, DTG prints are placed in the tri-fold position — at the bottom third of the towel. When the towel is folded and hung over an oven handle, the full design is visible. The most popular size for DTG is 27″×27″, with a 14″×16″ imprint area.

DTG uses water-based ink that bonds into the cotton fiber rather than building up on the surface — the print feels soft and moves naturally with the fabric. It won't crack, peel, or flake with regular washing.

Edge-to-edge is the method most people don't know exists until they see it — and then immediately want it.

In standard DTG printing, the towel is pre-hemmed before printing. That means the design goes on a finished towel, and the hem creates a natural border. Edge-to-edge works differently: the fabric is printed on a continuous roll first, then cut and hemmed. The result is a design that runs completely to every edge of the towel — no white margins, no unprinted borders, no visual interruption between the design and the seam.

For artists with bold repeating patterns, large-scale botanical illustrations, landscape artwork, or any design meant to fill a full surface, edge-to-edge is the method that does justice to the work. It's consistently our most popular choice for artists supplying museum gift shops, souvenir stores, and independent boutiques — places where the towel itself needs to look like a finished product, not a printed blank.