Recycling Weeded Vinyl

One of the things I've learned really quickly about my Cricut is it can create a lot of wasted vinyl and specialty cardstock. While I've been pretty lucky about getting my initial materials on sale, that's still a dollar or more per 12" x 12" sheet of material, with a lot of leftovers from the small projects I've been working on.

One option for using these leftovers is to cut your printed vinyl close to edges of your design before weeding, and use the leftover unprinted vinyl for another project. This is fairly simple if your designs are all small and relatively linear, like the geocaching reference number for The Other Half's car, or the starship profile I ironed on my multiple-process mixed-media T-shirt.

It's a bit less simple if you've printed out a corner flourish for your desk or notebook.

In the former case, you can fill a sheet with multiple copies of your artwork (if you need them). As an example, I can print my computer club's logo two-across on a 12" vinyl sheet, and then cut off the remaining nine inches for another project.

As long as your vinyl sheet has a ninety-degree corner (more or less) to align to the top and left sides of the mat, and it covers the area of the mat that will be printed, you're good to go.

If your vinyl scrap is more rounded, you may need an iPad or an iPhone and the Snap Mat feature of Cricut's DesignSpace app. (Note: there's a beta version of DesignSpace for Android, but it doesn't have Snap Mat.) The way it works is, you lay your vinyl (or other material) on the mat, take a picture of the mat through the app, and use the Move handles to move your pieces to where your vinyl is on the mat. The process is a bit slow and tricky at first, but as long as your Cricut registers your mat properly, you've got a great way to save material.

But what if your piece has one or more large interior spaces, the type which can't be cut (except maybe carefully, with a blade on a self-healing mat), and/or which is better weeded? Isn't there anything you can do with that?

Of course there is... at least, I think there is. Here are some of my hypotheses and tests:

Background: ready-to-cut eat transfer vinyl consists of two (or sometimes three) layers: the clear carrier layer, the effects layer (in holographic and reflective HTVs), and the adhesive layer.

1. Because the carrier is already resistant to melting at iron-on temperatures, can it be used as a protective layer for other iron-ons (such as layered HTV or typical inkjet t-shirt transfers)?
• So far, it seems to work OK for regular HTV. I've used it to iron hand-cut reflective hearts onto an old pair of cycling shorts to improve my night visibility.
• I haven't tried it yet with iron-on fabric or inkjet t-shirt transfers.
2. After weeding, the exposed part of the carrier is tacky — tacky enough to grab weed scraps from either your iron-on project or your adhesive vinyl project. Can these be used as carriers to use the weeded vinyl?
• If I have a large piece of HTV that has been weeded. Is the adhesive bond strong enough to reuse the carrier and have my Cricut cut the scrap vinyl?
• So far, I've only tried it with the carrier from glitter vinyl.
• It worked (relatively) fine for a scrap of reflective iron-on, which is almost as thin as foil HTV. The big issues were that the scraps could stretch out of plane (so they wouldn't lie flat on the carrier), and that it was difficult to keep bubbles from forming

After re-cutting

After re-cutting - close-up



• It didn't work as well for the scrap of glitter HTV, largely because the HTV didn't want to adhere well to the used carrier.

• Can I reuse the carrier as transfer tape for adhesive vinyl?
• Sadly, the answer for this appears to be "no". The HTV carrier is thicker and less flexible than the regular adhesive vinyl and its transfer tape. Even after burnishing, my Oracal 651 and Cricut Premium Vinyl both wanted to stay adhered to the carrier rather than my project. (Sorry, no pics for this one)

Similar questions exist for regular (sticky-back) adhesive vinyl and its backing. As long as the weeded scrap stays in plane and has enough stick to adhere to the used backing, the Cricut should work just fine.

Of course, if you're going to try to reuse non-heat-transfer-vinyl in this way, you will need to make sure you keep the adhesive as pristine as possible, and the carrier must be free from lint and scraps as well.



I hope this helps some of you electronic-cutter folk get some more mileage from your materials.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part II

Now that I'd decided to do a "scientific" experiment on the choice of paints and fabric mediums for t-shirt painting, I had to gather my supplies. Searching "fabric medium" on Michaels' website came up with three relevant products: Liquitex Fabric Medium, Americana Fabric Painting Medium, and Delta Ceramcoat Textile Medium. While we only sell the Liquitex product online, we do sell Golden GAC-900 and Martha Stewart Crafts Tintable Fabric Medium — both of which did not show up in the search — in-store. This gave me four fabric medium products to test.

Fabric Mediums

My craft paint stash includes Apple Barrel, Americana, Folk Art, and Martha Stewart Crafts acrylic craft paints as well as a few old tubes of "Liquitex Acrylic Artist Color" and a couple of colors of Fabric Creations Soft Fabric Ink (which does not require the addition of fabric medium).

Craft Paints

Old Liquitex Acrylic Paints

I added to this a bottle of Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink in Cadmium Yellow Light Hue, a bottle of Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic Paint in Cadmium Orange Hue, a bottle of Golden High Flow paint in Cerulean Blue Hue, and a bottle of Golden Fluid Acrylic Paint in Teal. Based on Golden's website and the samples on the bottles, I expect both Golden paints to be relatively opaque.

Thinner-Bodied Artist Paints and Inks

Because I'm looking at doing this in our classroom during off time, I'll also have access to the CraftSmart acrylic paints and Tulip Soft Matte fabric paints leftover from previous events. While I should probably add our house-brand Artist Loft acrylic paints to the mix, I think I have enough variety — four mediums at five paint-to-medium ratios times nine or ten paints, plus a control (no fabric medium) for each... we're talking over a hundred samples, and possibly over 200. The samples need to be at least an inch square, if not two inches square, to have enough material to bend to check flexibility and tendency to crack. Because of the number of samples I'm going to need, I'm not going to heat treat until all my samples are done, and I'm going to wait the full week after that until laundering them.

I brought my materials into work a couple of hours early on Monday, so I could start work on the project. After about an hour and a half of solid painting work, I'm four paints into the project, and the entire front of one T-shirt.

First four - a bit overexposed to show the Liquitex Ink (top set)

I'm debating whether to use the back of that shirt for my next set of samples, or if I should start a new shirt so I can hang the patches side by side.

Meanwhile, it's become apparent that (at least among the thinner paints I've tested so far) paint-to-medium ratios of less than 1:1, produce is some bleeding. In general, the thinner the paint, the greater the bleeding — but what surprised me is how much more bleeding there was with the GAC-900 — which is supposed to be the highest quality of the fabric mediums I used — compared to the other fabric mediums.

GAC-900 is the top row of each paint set. Control at far left; ratios go from 3:1 on the left to 1:3 on the right

I want to see if the bleeding reduces as I test the heavier paints. It may be that the paint-to-medium ratios, and the preferred fabric mediums to use, may change with the viscosity and pigmentation of the paints used. It's also apparent that the dilution effect of fabric medium decreases the opacity of the paints  —  and that some fabric mediums are worse than others. Again, this may change with both the quality and thickness of paint as well as the individual fabric mediums. Since I've only gotten through about 40% of my test slate, the answers are still waiting to be found.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part I

So, after the disaster that was last month's Halloween costumes (post-wash), I began to wonder whether my issues with fabric medium were a function of the specific brands I used, the brands of paint I used, the mixing proportions, or something else. My craft paint stash includes Apple Barrel, Folk Art, Martha Stewart, and Americana colors. The various fabric medium containers I've read have suggested anything from a 3:1 to a 1:1 paint to medium mixture, and some might have even suggested flipping the proportions (1 part fabric medium to 2 or 3 parts paint). Some instruct you to heat set with an iron or a press; others say you can toss your (dry) t-shirt in the dryer. Potentially crucially, a couple brands also suggest you let the heat-set paint cure for up to a week before washing, and/or to not let heat-set hand-painted fabrics anywhere near the dryer.

If this sounds confusing, you're not alone.

And just in case you were thinking it was just a fabric medium labeling issue... I'm pretty sure some of those mixing ratios should change with the initial thickness of the paint one is using (less fabric medium with thinner paints, more with thicker ones). In addition to CraftSmart, Americana, Folk Art, and Martha Stewart craft paints, we sell Liquitex acrylic ink, BASICS paint, soft body paint, and heavy body paint; we sell Golden High Flow, Fluid, and Heavy Body colors, along with Golden's GAC-900 fabric medium.

In the end, what I need to know is how much fabric medium, if any, to add to what type of paint, for the best effect — and what sort of after-painting treatment to use for anything I intend to wear more than once (or anything that needs to not fall like cardboard). So like any self-respecting person with an engineering degree (and full STEAM ahead), I'm going to experiment. I'm gathering a selection of my existing supplies, purchasing an array of fabric mediums, adding in some professional-level paints and artist inks for good measure, and using a leftover T-shirt or two as a canvas (excuse the pun) on which to test these paints and fabric mediums methodically. The result will be a sort of paint patch-test which I can then use as a reference for future fabric painting.