I want to make some tshirts with full color designs, and typically I would use Dye sublimation except that these tshirts are 100% cotton. So off I went to Google.
I found the following two articles that talk about dye sublimating ON TOP OF white heat transfer vinyl. Cool! This would be awesome! However, in both articles they’re using glitter HTV.
Have any of you ever done this over regular HTV? In particular I have rolls of Siser Easy Weed and Cricut Sport Flex already. My concern is that pressing the HTV at the temperatures for Dye Sub might melt the HTV. If not I’ll just have to do an experiment.
I did this a couple years ago and mine turned out very meh. The colors were not bright and crisp. Although admittedly I didn’t really do test runs at all which shame on me. regular white HTV will take color, just not sure how much or how vividly. You’d have to definitely run some test pieces. I /think/ it’s faded a bit with washings, but I couldn’t say for sure
Here’s the shirt. I obviously didn’t do a great job on this. Totally should have tested out various ink levels and heat/time levels. But you can kinda see on here that little offset at the top is more colorful that the image on the vinyl. I don’t think I have a photo of it from a couple years ago so hard to say if or how much the vinyl color faded
Edit: This was using whatever brand of HTV we had at the space
We have had success using Siser Easy-Subli. It’s a little expensive but it works pretty well. I have also seen another product that is similar but less expensive…I can’t remember what it is now but it really only worked on light colored fabric. If I find it again I’ll post a link for you.
Sure thing! I think I’ll try it on something small first before I commit some tshirts to it. If I can get my hands on a few different varieties of HTV I may do a comparison across multiple types.
All of this will have to wait a few months until after we get our house back and (remodeling after water leak ruined all the floors) and my stuff is out of storage, though.
Its a pain, but the silver lining is that we get to replace the floors that we’ve hated since we moved in. Now if we could just skip to the end all would be great.
