Frustrations with printing on fabric

For the scarves pictured below, I printed the images on Printed Treasures pre-treated 200-count pima cotton fabric, made by Dritz. As with most of the pre-treated fabric products, they weren't cheap. I believe the package of 5 8.5" x 11" sheets was $18 at JoAnn Fabrics. I was able to use a 40% off coupon. The first sheetI printed came out with pale horizontal lines across the entire image, so I cleaned the printer head and the next image came out without the lines, but the saturation and contrast were a little pale. I didn't follow their instructions to use the "Best" quality setting because in my previous experience with printing on fabric, that spills out too much ink, so I used the next setting down. For my third attempt, I used the highest quality image setting - bingo. Good color and contrast, and during rinsing, little ink ran out.

I wasn't entirely happy with the weight of their 200-count pima cotton so wanted to try something different. I purchased a package of 6 sheets of silk habotai, also at JoAnn Fabrics, for $13.99, made by Blumenthal (Crafter's Choice PhotoFabric). I figured that would be nice and lightweight. I also picked up a package of their cotton poplin to compare that to the Dritz pima cotton.

The Crafter's Choice instructions are a little confusing. It says to "set printer parameters to "normal" resolution and "plain paper" to save ink or on high resolution for finer details." I assume by "normal" or "high" they meant photo quality. I wanted fine detail, so I used the highest photo quality setting, which then did NOT let me choose plain/normal paper. I had to select a photo paper setting so I tried "presentation paper matte" which is what I use to print on a matte finish photo paper, and I knew choosing a glossy paper setting wouldn't be right. I followed the instructions for my first experiment on the silk habotai to let it dry after printing, I removed the backing, ironed it and then ran it under tap water. ALL of the blue ink ran out. Every last bit. Image ruined. I thought perhaps it might have to do with the fact that I used the highest print quality setting, so I tried another run with the next-best image quality setting which my printer then also let me choose "normal" paper to go with. Nope. All of the blue ink ran out again. I'm done with the silk. And it's a shame becuase it's nice and light and drapey. 3 sheets ruined because during my first experiment, I actually printed 2 sheets because I figured I'd have no problem.

The cotton poplin didn't run as much, but did bleed a tiny bit. Just enough that when I compare that image with the Dritz Printed Treasures images, the color is off a bit. The cotton poplin images are alos a tiny bit blurrier than the Dritz images, and surprisingly, the cotton poplin is stiffer than Dritz's pima cotton.

I was hoping it would be the other way around because $18 for 5 sheets is a lot more expensive than $14 for 6, and I didn't see any bulk packages of either one to use a future coupon on.

I may go back to printing my own using BubbleJet Set, if I can find the heavy duty freezer paper sheets that someone's blog mentioned. I have had no luck getting regular freezer paper to adhere well enough to my "print my own" sheets. I've tried using full-sheet labels but they're very expensive.

Any ideas, tips, thoughts, are welcome! Because right now I'm on a roll with these scarves, and if worse comes to worse I'll buy more of the Printed Treasures sheets, one trip/coupon at a time!