This is a trial for embedding heating thread on fabric for thermochromic prints. The copper thread is bind on the back side of the woven fabric to be used as heating elements while the front side of the fabric remains flat satin construction for silk screen printing.

back side with copper thread inserts

front side shows the satin structure.

As for the construction of the fabric, I used the extra weft technique, which creates floating weft face on the front side without letting the back side weft thread appearing on the front side. You could probably do similar effect using double layer construction, but this technique will bind the heating thread on the back closer to the front side as it does not create two layers.

The green dots shows the front side weft (white cotton in the example fabric) and the blue and orange indicates the back side weft. Blue dots shows where gray thread is used as weft and orange dot shows where the copper thread as weft is used. Do not cut the copper weft thread as you want to keep the conductivity throughout the fabric to use as heating element.

As for weaving, I used computerized shaft loom from Toika, with the warp 12/cm, cotton thread setup.