It’s that time of year again, everything you see is decorated for the Holidays. Red and Green, bows, lights, stripes and so on. This week we decided to give you some festive designs for shirt decoration. We created three shirts using some of our holiday patterns. Patterns are a perfect way to get some unique full color designs without using any type of printer, just your cutter. All you have to do is use Corel Draw, Illustrator, Cad Worx Live or Roland Cut Studio to create a vector design and send it to your cutter with the white side of the pattern roll up. Weed away the excess, heat apply, and remove the mylar!
Here is a look at some Holiday Patterns that are available :
Spectra Patterns are also available in many other non-holiday styles and colors that can be found on our website. In addition, you can get custom patterns made from your artwork, just give us a call or send an email to learn how. Have a great holiday and enjoy the video!
Who doesn’t want to be able to decorate full color? Everyone does, especially on dark garments. All you need is an optic eye cutter like the Roland GX-24 and an Inkjet or Laser Printer. So in this week’s video, we’re going to show you how.
So essentially all that you need is some opaque transfer paper, and a cutter with an optic eye.The two papers that we used in our examples is our Inkjet for Darks paper and our Jetflex Premium for Dark. Opaque transfer paper is just a paper that has a non-transparent layer that you print on to then heat apply to the shirt. Since it is not transparent, it blocks out the color of the shirt from coming through and show only what you print on to. The only trick here is that anything that is not printed in color is going to remain white, and therefore will need to either be part of the design or it will need cut out. That is why it is so important to have the optic eye cutter.
An optic eye cutter like the Roland GX-24 will allow you to import a bitmap file into the Cut Studio software and basically “vectorize” the graphic so you can cut what you want out, even if all you want to do is just cut the outline. In our examples, we show a couple graphics where we only cut the outline, and the other where we cut individual numbers and letters for a player combo.
Graphic #1 in our video is a classic example for this type of full color process, a family reunion photo. This could be a picture of any kind, shape, size etc. You can simple cut the boundaries of the photo and heat apply or even add a decorative border. Similiar examples for this type of application would be a barbeque, birthday, homecoming, in memory of, or event.
The second graphic is a typical logo. The Seawolves logo that we used show how you can print in full color and contour cut around the logo, then simply heat apply it onto the shirt. This could be a left chest logo, full front or back, tail etc.
The final graphic here shows a standard name and number combo. To jazz it up a little, we decided to powerclip the sea wolves logo into the number. This graphic demonstrates how important it is to have the optic eye cutter to cut detail, every letter and number were cut individually. The difference in this graphic is that we had to use a heat transfer mask to lift the graphic from the transfer paper and keep it all together on the shirt, which is necessary when making multiple cuts.
Using opaque transfer paper with your GX-24 is just one more profit center for your business. This may not suit every application or taste, but it is a viable option for several applications. The beauty is, most of us already have the equipment that we need, a heat press, cutter, and desktop printer. If you have any questions about this week’s shirts please let us know. Stay tuned for next week’s “Pimp A Shirt – Thanksgiving Edition” when we show you how to use a turkey to decorate a shirt !
This week we decided to focus on 2 digital medias that can be used with a vinyl cutter or a Versacamm printer / cutter. These two medias are the Solution Vintage Puff and Solution Metallic. Whether being simply cut and applied or printed in full color, these medias will help to give your garment a very unique custom look. Take a look at some of this week’s pictures for example of the Puff and Metallic media.
Let’s start by talking about the Solution Vintage Puff media. This media has a few very important characteristics that make it very useful. Being part of the Solutions line of products, this media has a universal adhesive so you can use it on a variety of garments. As the name would suggest, this product also comes with a 3D ” Puff ” look. Basically, all you need to do is heat it to the parameters on the instruction sheet… (330 – 5 sec / ’ sec with cover sheet .. MED pressure)… and the media will puff up and become 3 Dimensional. This looks great whether it’s printed on the Versacamm or just cut with a vinyl cutter. As you can see in some of the pictures, we’ve used this media a lot in the past underneath another color to make it 3 dimensional or even on the inside of the shirt to do a reverse embossing type of look. Another trait of this material is that when printed, it provides a vintage and worn look. Very unique for the world of heat transfer.
Reverse Embossing with Puff
Printed Puff
Solution Metallic is also a great dual purpose media. With this media you can get a nice shiny chrome look that will go on virtually any fabric. True, this media is at a premium price, but the decoration results are well worth it. You can use this media to simply cut and for text designs, use it as a background to accent other media, or use the Versacamm to print and cut it. When you use it to print, it gives a nice shiny “metallic-y” look ! Very nice and perfect for several applications.
Printed Metallic
This week we wanted to give you some examples of some medias that can be used with a vinyl cutter or a Versacamm. Hopefully you found it helpful whether you have a cutter or Versacamm. Stay tuned next week for some down and dirty t-shirt pimping….GX-24 style !
This week we decided to do something a little different and show you how to “pimp-a-shirt” digitally, with a Roland Versacamm print and cut machine. So you can really see the differences, we took our pimp-a-shirt logo and produced it the tradtional way with heat applied film, and digitally with the versacamm on the other side of a 100% ringspun cotton t-shirt.
As you know, the logo is about 7 colors in all. With the traditional vinyl cutter and heat applied film method we had to use 7 separate rolls of film. Since we’re the “official” shirt pimping experts…we decided to show off a little and mix it up. We used black, cyan, and orange Eco Film, white, green, and purple Fashion Flock, and some columbia blue MEGAtallic for some extra spice. For anyone unfamiliar with these products, Eco Film is our famous hot or cold peel solid colored material, Fashion Flock is a soft polyester material with a slight dimension, and MEGAtallic is a shiny film with silver glitter throughout it. The result was a pretty awesome, mixed media pimp-a-shirt design that is so unique you couldn’t possibly mimic it with any other decoration method. I have some customers who have done shirts like this and charged $100 or more in some cases for a shirt like this. The key is producing a garment that is totally unique and un-repeatable with any other method.
The second part of this week’s shirt was produced using the Roland Versacamm print and cut machine. With this method, we are starting with a white opaque roll of material specially coated to accept solvent or eco-solvent ink. We chose to use Spectra Quickprint. This digital media is good for cottons / polys / and blends and offers an extremely easy weed, nice feel, and stretchability. Rather than separating the design into 7 individual colors, we simply welded the design so the was only one line to cut…around the outside of the logo. We send this to the Versacamm and voila! The design is printed and cut perfectly with one click of a button. The major difference here is that the digital method took about 20% of the time that it took to produce the cad cut method. So the moral of the story is, you can produce your awesome designs with the Verascamm, save a bunch of time over using cad cut and innovate with the wide variety of digital media available.
Let’s watch the video, shall we?
Stay tuned to next week’s Pimp-A-Shirt where we are going to explain even more about what you can do with the Versacamm and explore some of the other digital medias available.
Our creation this week is as simple as can be as far as design goes, but the garment is one that is very difficult to decorate with heat transfer. The garment we have used is a fully sublimated t-shirt from Journeys. What is a sublimated garment you ask? Well it is a piece of apparel where the decoration is printed into the fabric and then sewn together to complete it. For more info on sublimation, visit http://www.dyesub.org/.
What makes this type of garment so difficult to decorate by heat trasnfer is dye migration. When a garment is sublimated, applying heat to it will activate the dyes in the fabric causing it to bleed through the vinyl. This makes it impossible to use any vinyl that is white or light in color, unless it has blocking agents in the vinyl to block the dye migration. In our case, we used a metallic red vinyl so we would not have to worry about the dye coming through.
The shirt used in this video fit perfectly for the website being promoted. It features an all over print of $100 bills. Six figure professionals probably see quite a few benjamins, so this one was a no brainer to use. The desing being applied is simply the URL, www.sixfigureprofessionals.com with the tagline below it. Check it out.
