Printable material

#The present invention relates to a printable material, including a material suitable for use as a heat transfer material.

#In recent years, a significant industry has developed which involves the application of customer-selected designs, messages, illustrations, and the like (referred to collectively hereinafter as "customer-selected graphics") on articles of clothing, such as T-shirts, sweat shirts, and the like. These customer-selected graphics typically are commercially available products tailored for that specific end-use. The graphics typically are printed on a release or transfer paper. They are applied to the article of clothing by means of heat and pressure, after which the release or transfer paper is removed.

#Some effort has been directed to allowing customers the opportunity to prepare their own graphics for application to an article of clothing. The preparation of such graphics typically involves the use of colored crayons made from a heat-transferable material. Such crayons have been made available in kit form, which also includes an unspecified heat transfer sheet having an outlined pattern thereon. In a variation of the kit, the transferable pattern is created from a manifold of a heat transfer sheet and a reverse or lift-type copy sheet having a pressure transferable coating of heat transferable material thereon. By generating the pattern or artwork on the obverse face of the transfer sheet with the pressure of a drafting instrument, a heat transferable mirror image pattern is created on the rear surface of the transfer sheet by pressure transfer from the copy sheet. The heat transferable mirror image then can be applied to a T-shirt or other article by heat transfer.

#FIG. 1 is a fragmentary sectional view of a first embodiment of an ink jet printable heat transfer material made in accordance with the present invention.

#FIG. 2 is a fragmentary sectional view of a second embodiment of an ink jet printable heat transfer material made in accordance with the present invention.

#As used herein, the term "printable" is meant to include the placement of an image on a material by any means, such as by direct and offset gravure printers, silk-screening, typewriters, laser printers, dot-matrix printers, and ink-jet printers, by way of illustration. Moreover, the image composition can be any of the inks or other compositions typically used in printing processes.

#The term "ink-jet printable" refers to the formation of an image on a material, e.g., paper, by means of an ink-jet printer. In an ink-jet printer, ink is forced through a tiny nozzle (or a series of nozzles) to form droplets. The droplets are electrostatically charged and are attracted to an oppositely charged platen behind the paper. By means of electrically controlled deflection plates, the trajectories of the droplets can be controlled to hit the desired spot on the paper. Unused droplets are deflected away from the paper into a reservoir for recycling.

#The term "molecular weight" generally refers to a weight-average molecular weight unless another meaning is clear from the context or the term does not refer to a polymer. It long has been understood and accepted that the unit for molecular weight is the atomic mass unit, sometimes referred to as the "dalton." Consequently, units rarely are given in current literature. In keeping with that practice, therefore, no units are expressed herein for molecular weights.