Discuss the various aspects of heat press technology. Transfer paper, inks, plastisol transfers, vinyl cutters, printers, commercial usage, durability, suppliers, etc.
ok so i have designed some simples designs, using 5 bold colours. but now i am stuck where to go. what i thought i would do was, print the designs on my printer, then use a vinyl cutter to cut them out, then use a heat press to put the design on the t-shirt. is this possible???? i have being reading about vinyl cutter and they only do one colour? is iron on transfer the only option? i would like to get the best quality i can get, i have been told iron on paper is hard on feels like cardboard on the t-shirt.
i guess what i would like to know, what is the best way in pressing my designs on a heat press using 5 colours.......
Any help would be extremely helpful, as i don't know which road to go down........
Vinyl cutter will cut 'around' jpg images if the cutter has an optic eye feature. You could do five color vinyl cut IF the colors were solid, but that would be a task! you would have to cut each color and then line up and press..probably a pess for each color. Some of the transfers do feel less heavy then others...but remember the normal transfer is ON the garment and you will feel it..you don't say what kind of printer you have..inkjet or laser..and if you are pressing on white/ash...sublimation will do full color with absolutely no hand at all..but the set up..printer/ink ..is costly and you are limited to polyester and white/ash. Options for cotton and laser is duracotton and imageclip..both have very little hand..both have to be on white..duracotton is single step..imageclip is two step..there are threads on both in the forum. Forum member badalou has some nice videos on Youtube.com..go there and search under his name..
ok well i have an epson 2400 inkjet printer. i have watched Badalou on youtubbe, that is very helpful, but he uses transfer paper, cuts round it himself then uses the heat press. What i am finding hard to understand is whether i can get the same effect using as vinyl cutter, that will give me a better quaility t-shirt. Also it will make things easier and quicker. I will be pressing on white and light colored 100% cotton t-shirts mainly. My designs are on illustrator to.
what do you think is the best way to go about this. this is not one of me designs, but say you have a t-shirt design with a bunch of 5 balloon on it. each a different solid colour. black, red, green, blue and yellow. what would be the best way????
sorry i have no idea what you mean, could you explain? i have not bought anything yet, i am trying to understand what is the best thing to do and buy. i have only the completed designs and a good inkjet printer, but i am not sure if i even need the printer? i just want to understand the best way of getting the best quality heat press with the 5 colours i have
Plastisol is a type of ink. A transfer is your image printed to velum or some other type of paper that releases the ink/design into the shirt when heated. You'd need to contact a screen printer or some print house that does custom transfers for their customers. They usually have a minimum order and charge per color but it may be to your advantage to have a print house create your transfers and then you could press them on to shirts when an order is placed, etc, etc
i would prefer to try and do everything myself, keeping the costs down.
i still can believe there is no other way to printer multi colousr on a t-shirt using a heat press. surely there is a way? i mean vinyl sounds great but once the point if you can only do one colour? makes no sense.....
i would prefer to try and do everything myself, keeping the costs down.
i still can believe there is no other way to printer multi colousr on a t-shirt using a heat press. surely there is a way? i mean vinyl sounds great but once the point if you can only do one colour? makes no sense.....
well I understand what you are saying but printing techniques are governed by technology, the type of ink you are using and the material from which a garment is made. An Inkjet Printer CAN put a 5 color image on your t-shirt but the color of the shirt you are using is a factor.
Inkjet printers use an opaque type of ink. Printing to white colored and pastel shirts is pretty easy. Several vendors sell a tranfer paper for this. When pressing to shirts with an inkjet printer you would print your image reversed to the transfer paper. You would then heat press that image to the shirt, the heat causes the ink to vaporize and sink into the fibers on the shirt. On white and light colored shirts this works great and looks very good too. It usually does not require that you 'weed' or cut out your image because on the transfer paper if an area was left blank or devoid of ink.....then there is no ink there to be transferred when you heat press.
It works a little bit differently on a black/dark colored or opaque shirt.
On a shirt like that your image needs a backing which is usually some type of polymer. You print this out through your inkjet printer and then you cut or weed around your graphic and then you heatpress that to the t-shirt. You need the backing because the the inks are opaque and you would not see much of anything if you tried to print opaque ink to an opaque shirt.
so your inkjet printer is able to print to a t-shirt but there are stipulations.
Hope I did not confuse you at all. Hope the info helped.
Also, I think there is a printer/cutter that prints on vinyl and then through the use of an optical cutter it trims and weeds your image leaving you with just the image on vinyl to press to your garment.
trying to do everything yourself when you don't know the lingo, equipment and process is a receipe for disappointment and withdrawal from the business. I would suggest you start by outsourcing...take a little profit while you learn. For example I just completed a three color image...and I used F&M expressions for plastisol..They have a large sheet...I put two images on a sheet..had an order for 100 tees.. each sheet cost me just over $5 - so that was 2.50 per shirt...2.50 for a colored shirt..total cost $5 and they sold for $;9.95.. And I did not have to worry about mistakes, etc.
Plastisol transfer is an image placed on a transfer sheet and then applied to the garment via heat press rather than direct screen printing. It looks,feels like screen printing because it is...just in a different method of application
another good way to start out...is to outsource your designs to a DTG..direct to garment..printer..that would be economical and easy..you can do dark or light garment...depending on the DTG printer being used.
There are a lot of posts on DTG and Plastisol...do the search
I am not familiar with the printer you list...but to do good transfer, you will need a pigmented ink...again there are a lot of posts about this.
I don 't think you read my post earlier...I did state how I did three colors with a vinyl cutter...also I mentioned how a vinyl cutter with optic eye can cut around an image...see Josh Ellingsworth video on imprintables.com
There is not really a ONE answer for you...there are many options available and I may use 3-4 different methods in a month...depends on the job, the garment and the easiest way for me to get the product out
thankyou powermoves that was really helpful indeed!
however i do have this problem, i have looked into optical vinyl cutters...
i have an A4 design with lots of small images on it, with space around each image. so i have to put the whole A4 transfer on the t-shirt. so once the peel the paper leaving the print i am left with the unused gel that does not have an image on it. you can see the A4 boarder, making it look tacky and unprofessional. how does one get around this? could an optical vinyl cutter cut round these small and fiddley images???? so the only area that gets printed on the t-shirt is the images themselves....
thankyou powermoves that was really helpful indeed!
however i do have this problem, i have looked into optical vinyl cutters...
i have an A4 design with lots of small images on it, with space around each image. so i have to put the whole A4 transfer on the t-shirt. so once the peel the paper leaving the print i am left with the unused gel that does not have an image on it. you can see the A4 boarder, making it look tacky and unprofessional. how does one get around this? could an optical vinyl cutter cut round these small and fiddley images???? so the only area that gets printed on the t-shirt is the images themselves....
The optical printer/cutter most likely could help but it just depends on how small these images are. The cutter works similar to a plotter and uses math and coordinates and measurements to do what it does. I would guess it depends on the specs of the hardware and the software it uses to do the plotting/cutting.
one thing you have not addressed is when others have told you may have to hire out and you responded by saying you wanted to do everything yourself to keep price down. Believe it or not, doing everything in house is not always cheaper. how many shirts are you doing? is it this a short run of shirts or will you be producing shirts on a regular basis. You should tell us that and then we could provide better answers to your questions.
heat press, vinyl cutting???? 
