FALL RIVER — When good fortune struck earlier this year, it more closely resembled disaster, Kris Potter said.

A good customer came to Potter’s business, Cambridge Offset Printing in Cambridge, with a great order. The artist, Dan Fein, asked if Kris and her husband, Greg Potter, could print and build 5,000 tote bags in his design. He needed them in time for the upcoming Christmas season.

“We said yes,” Kris Potter said. “But we weren’t prepared to produce that much. We looked all winter for seamstresses in Boston.”

But Potter was born and raised in Fall River. She went to her aunt, Natalie Mello, to tell her how hard it was to good workers who knew how to sew. That gave Mello, a veteran of the Fall River mills, a good laugh.

“My aunt knows a lot of people from that industry,” Potter said.

On Thursday, Mello was at work on those tote bags, moving the heavy cloth through a sewing machine in the new branch of Cambridge Offset Printing at 822 Eastern Ave. Mello is one of seven people working in Fall River. Potter said the company will probably have to add a shift before Christmas.

The company’s most popular product is the dye sublimation process. They used it to print Fein’s design on bolts of heavy cloth. Then they cut the cloth and sewed it into bags.

Dye sublimation is a new process that allows printers to apply dye precisely to cloth, wood, steel, paper, plastic or glass. On a T-shirt covered in design, the cloth is soft and pliable. Unlike a screen print design, the design doesn’t stiffen the cloth, doesn’t crack and doesn’t peel off in the wash.

Fein’s design is possible only through the process. He takes pages from great works of literature — “Moby-Dick,” “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland,” “Pride and Prejudice” — and cuts out silhouette designs in the print. The printed words with the cut out silhouettes are printed on the shirts, tote bags, posters and coffee mugs.

There is a whale’s tale for “Moby-Dick,” a Victorian girl falling for “Alice,” a young woman in a bonnet for “Pride and Prejudice.”

But the crew in Fall River is doing much more than that, Potter said.

In the three weeks since they opened, they have produced T-shirts for a bachelorette party, a baby blanket printed with the baby’s name, wedding pictures printed poster size on canvas as well as logos for companies and uniforms for schools.

The company is located in the building that once was the home of Medeiros Bakery, on the east side of Eastern Avenue, just south of Pleasant Street.