Printing colored designs on cotton cloth is similar to printing on paper.
Long runs of the same fabric design are produced on a roller print machine

operating at speeds between 50 to 100 yards a minute. As many as of 10 different colors can be printed in one continuous operation.
A typical printing machine has a large padded drum or cylinder, which is surrounded by a series of copper rollers, each with its own dye trough and doctor blade that scrapes away excess dye. The number of rollers varies according to the fabric design, since each color in the design is etched on a separate roller. As the cloth moves between the rotating drum and rollers under great pressure, it picks up color from the engraved area of each roller in sequence. The printed cloth is dried immediately and conveyed to an oven that sets the dye.
Automatic screen-printing is another principal method for imparting colored designs to cotton fabrics. Although slower than roller printing, it has the advantage of producing much larger and more intricate designs, elaborate shadings and various handcrafted effects.
In flat bed screen-printing, the fabric design is reproduced on fine mesh screens, one for each color. On each screen, the areas in the design that are not to be penetrated by the dye are covered with lacquer or some other dye-resistant coating. The screens are coated with dye on the back and mounted in the proper sequence above a flat bed. As a belt carries the fabric along from screen to screen, a squeegee or roller presses the dye through the open area of the screen onto the fabric.
The new flat bed machines can have speeds of up to 1,200 yards per hour for a fabric with a 36-inch design repeat.
Faster by far are the recently developed rotary screen printing machines with production speeds of up to 3,500 yards an hour. The system combines roller and screen printing, utilizing perforated cylinders instead of flat screens. The color paste is fed inside the cylinders and a small metal roller forces the color through the pores of the cylinder onto the fabric which is moving continuously under the cylinders. As many as 16 colors can be printed on one fabric using this method. Use of this technique is increasing since the screens or cylinders can be produced less expensively than the engraved copper rollers used in roller printing.