Delayering Iron-On Vinyl for Improved Wearability

Two major issues with multiple-single-color vinyl designs are that there is no method for registering the various colors so the cuts all line up, and that many images are built color-layer upon color-layer, resulting in a finished product that is thick, inflexible, and vulnerable to multiple failure modes (adhesive doesn't stick to blank; adhesive doesn't stick to adhesive; bulging layered area more prone to vinyl being melted during application, or being torn during wear...)

Cricut Design Space's Duplicate and Slice tools make it very easy to remove the underlayers from your design and create a finished product that is well-adhered, comfortable to wear, and long-lasting.

Here's how to do it.

I.

Select a design and bring it into your canvas. (You can either select something from Cricut Access and choose the "Customize" option, or select something from another source.) For this example, I'm using "Koala Hugging Heart" (#MA52A3F9) from Cricut's "A Land Down Under" collection.



As you will note from the Layers panel on the right, this image is composed of three overlapping images, with the inside ears and features cut out of both the middle red layer and upper gray layer. You will also notice that the three layers are grouped.
.

While this would create a great three-dimensional image on cardstock (using glue dots between the black and red layers, and dimensional dots between the red and gray layers), in vinyl this would  create two layers through much of the graphic, expanding to three layers over the koala itself. So, we are going to use the duplicate and slice functions to remove the underlayers.

II.

Select the image. 

From the Layers panel (or the Edit panel on a tablet or smartphone), select "Ungroup". 

This allows us to work each layer individually, or in groups of two for slicing.

III.

Select the red and black layers. (You can select multiple layers by holding down the <Shift> key on a computer, or long-pressing the second and subsequent layers on your tablet or phone.)

Select Slice from the bottom of the Layers menu (computer), or from the Actions menu (tablet or phone). 

This will give you three "slices": 

• a red koala
• an identical black koala, and 
• a black set of koala ears-and-features.

IV.

From the Layers panel, select the black koala.  (It doesn't matter that the red koala is on top.)

Delete the black koala.

V.

Select the gray koala and the red koala.

To make sure they're aligned correctly, select "Align" from the menu bar (computer) or the Edit menu (tablet or phone), and select "Align left" and then "Align middle".

Select Slice from the bottom of the Layers menu (computer), or from the Actions menu (tablet or smartphone). 

Again, this will give you three "slices":

• the original gray koala
• an identical red koala
• a red heart with cutouts for the koala's paws.

VI.

Select, then delete, the red koala.

VII (optional).

If you want to save vinyl, you can separate the inside ears from the facial features as follows:

Select "Shapes" from the menu bar, then select "Square".

Position the square over one ear of the koala.

Select the square and the Slice Result containing the koala's features.

Select "Slice".

Select and delete the square.

Select and delete the extra koala inner ear.

Repeat for the second ear.

This will leave you with five layers instead of three. On the original 6.664" x 5" image, this will save about a 2" square of vinyl, about half of the black vinyl needed to cut the image already laid out. Vinyl savings will increase with a larger image size.

Color changed to yellow for visibility

VIII. 

Cut your image.

Remember to mirror iron-on vinyl (or conversely, don't mirror it and do a koala facing to the left). Weed all cut images.

IX. Applying vinyl

For the example image, iron on the koala first. Peel the carrier and keep it (we'll come back to it).
Position the facial features and inner ears. Place the carrier from the koala on top of the image before ironing on the eyes and inner ears.
Peel, retaining again the carrier from the koala.
Position the heart. Again cover the koala with its carrier before ironing on the last part of the image.

For a more complex image, you might want to make a copy of all the parts of the image, change it all to a single color, and cut out the copy in cardstock to use as a template.

Thoughts on Mixing Iron-On Transfers, HTV, and Patterned HTV

For a recent set of t-shirt prototypes for my STARFLEET chapter, I needed a detailed print of a STAR TREK starship, STAR TREK-style lettering, and something to create a starfield background.

It was obvious at the start that I would need to use Print Then Cut on standard iron-on transfer sheets for the starship. I wanted to see if I could use "light" (see-through) iron-on transfer sheets on top of white Siser EasyWeed^® Electric Heat Transfer Vinyl to create a metallic effect, or if I would need to use the solid-white iron-on transfer sheets meant for dark fabrics.

While the 6.5" x 9.25" bounding box Design Space requires for registration limits the size of my image, basic geometry tells me that if I angle the image to use the top corner of the box on one side, and the bottom on the other, I should be able to Print Then Cut an image greater than 9" in its long dimension. Unfortunately, no matter what orientation I set my starship, or what angle I saved and resaved it at in Photoshop, Design Space insisted on placing it on a vertical or horizontal axis and telling me it was too large for Print Then Cut. I ended up having to edit the orientation again in Mat View in order to print my images at something approaching my desired size.

Once I got my graphic in the correct size and orientation, I used a rotated version of it to create a "knockout" against a desired circular "star field" of either "Galaxy Black" Siser Glitter Heat Transfer Vinyl or Siser EasyPatterns^® Heat Transfer Vinyl in "Infinite Galaxy" (that is to say, I delayered my text and images from my background).

Then I printed and cut the color-enhanced line-art starship from both dark-fabric and light-fabric iron-on transfers. I also cut the outline from "Pearl" (metallic white) Siser EasyWeed^® Electric Heat Transfer Vinyl to place under the sheer "light fabric" transfer. I also cut the rest of my graphics (round "star field", chapter name, NCC number, "stardate" established, URL, and What 3 Words location)

Unlike most other heat transfer vinyls, Siser EasyPatterns^® is cut from the "right" side of the vinyl, and is transferred to the surface to be ironed by a special vinyl transfer tape that is supposed not to be the same as the transfer tape used for adhesive vinyl.  I decided to try to use this transfer tape to position and iron on not just the EasyPatterns vinyl, but the dark fabric iron-on transfer as well.

The two prototypes I ended up with were purple (chapter's main color) with the "Infinite Galaxy" pattern for the star field and (if I recall correctly) the dark-fabric transfer for the starship, and navy (another "spacey" color) with "Galaxy Black" glitter for the star field, the white EasyWeed Electric and the light-fabric iron-on transfer for the starship. Both t-shirts used plain white for the lettering.

(Sadly, I didn't take pictures before I sold the one prototype and gave the other one to our chapter president to show off at an upcoming STAR TREK convention.)

It had been a while since I worked with iron-on heat transfers — since before I purchased my Cricut Explore Air and (more importantly) my Cricut EasyPress. Sadly, things didn't work out quite the way I wanted. The light-fabric transfer didn't want to transfer the image properly to the heat transfer vinyl, and the temperatures I needed to place all the pieces together caused the Siser EasyWeed^® Electric Heat Transfer Vinyl to melt, and the iron-on transfers to melt a bit as well.

That said, a new design of chapter t-shirt is never an unwelcome thing, and it started us into a discussion of What 3 Words and its possible utility when colonizing an alien planet (hey, we're into STAR TREK, science fiction, and space exploration!)

Given the issues I had mixing the two types of iron-on, I finished the project knowing I'd need to do some more experimentation. Stay tuned for the next installment of "trying to get them to play nice together" <g>...

Working With Vinyl Scraps

One of the downsides of large T-shirt designs such as "Hippopotamus for Christmas" and "Dreidel for Dummies" is the amount of heat-transfer vinyl (iron-on, HTV) that they use. Not counting the costs for licensing Cricut Access images, the hippo T would have cost me $30 in materials; the dreidel T, $20, had I not been working at Michaels and been able to use Associate discounts on top of sale prices. I'm not counting design time or application time, and I've saved a significant amount of vinyl on the hippo by delayering the images. This would put the retail price of a vinyl T somewhere in the $30-40 range, even for a $2-on-sale craft T-shirt. (The blanks Cricut associates use on their instruction videos run $10-15 on sale at places like Target and Old Navy, making a more "designer" look that much more expensive!)

My colleague S. would have loved a hippo T, but the materials costs alone would be out of budget for her. I found a cute Snowman T-shirt pattern on Design Space that could be made cheaply from scrap vinyl — with a few tweaks to the pattern.

When I looked at the mats, I noticed all the little black dots for the snowman's eyes and mouth were attached, as well as the white dots for the reflections in the snowman's eyes. That ends up creating a lot of wasted vinyl. I also noticed that there was no way to register the cut so one knew exactly where to place the orange nose.

Since Design Space doesn't have a good way of setting registration marks, I decided to create a paper template.

First, I attached all of the design elements into a single cut image and resized it to an appropriate size for the T-shirt. Attaching elements turns them all the same color, but it's easy enough to turn them back later.)

I used this monochrome to cut my paper template. Instead of weeding the background, I weeded out the design elements to produce a template with openings for each of my vinyl cuts. While the weeding isn't perfect, it's sufficient for my purpose.

Next, I detached all of the design elements and returned them to their proper colors. I also delayered the inner eye, so I would only have one layer of vinyl throughout the shirt.

You'll notice these use a lot less vinyl if cut from a fresh roll. Each piece can be moved individually, so they can be positioned to use waste vinyl, either manually (in the Web app) or by using the Snap Mat feature on an iPad. I used scrap vinyl from "Dreidel for Dummies" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" for my white and black, and the rest of a "row" of rolled vinyl for my orange.

My final cost: about $6, if I include the vinyl as rolling inches.

Needless to say, S. was surprised and delighted.

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.

Is it really an EASY Press?

On Friday, July 27, Michaels stores across the country demonstrated the Cricut EasyPress for the nation's teachers.

As a home sewer and occasional iron-on-t-shirt maker, the EasyPress has been an interesting product to watch — although not necessarily one I really need. That said, our in-house guide said that the demonstrator should be an expert at the EasyPress so she can answer teachers' questions. So, I took a few hours the day before the event to familiarize myself with the EasyPress machine and its accessory EasyPress mat.

I came prepared with pre-cut designs for a couple of T-shirts, using several different types of Cricut and Siser heat transfer vinyls (aka "iron-ons") as well as a fabric iron-on and some fabric to which I'd previously applied HeatnBond^® Ultrahold, my stocks of HeatnBond^® Lite and HeatnBond^® UltraHold, a few T-shirts, a baseball cap, my tailor's ham, my Quilter's Cut 'n Press and some scraps of polyester and linen, as well as a few rolls of various types of HTV (heat transfer vinyl) and scraps from my cuttings and weedings.

EasyPress Versus the Iron

My iron is still from the days where there's a dial setting that goes Low (Acrylic/Silk/Nylon), Medium Low (Polyester), Medium (Wool), Medium High (Cotton), and High (Linen), with steam options not kicking in until you get at least up to Medium heat. I've done enough burn tests on scraps to know what burnt silk, polyester, wool, cotton, and linen look like and smell like. That said, I didn't know how the EasyPress's maximum setting of 360^° compares until I looked it up just now. [Update: on July 30, Cricut announced the Easy Press 2, which will debut Fall 2018. It will come in three sizes and heat up to 400°.] I do know that some customers have returned the EasyPress because it doesn't get hot enough for their needs — which is why I brought along both cotton and linen samples, which generally require the highest heat to press.

The EasyPress has a square sole plate with rounded corners, rather than the somewhat shoe-shaped standard household iron. As a presser, it has no vents — which means it heats more evenly (no more steam-hole marks in your ironing). Its larger area means it can potentially press larger, flat pieces of fabric more rapidly than an iron. It comes with a sample project: a glitter iron-on teacup and a 4" x 4" piece of canvas fabric.

The EasyPress is heavier than a regular iron, but that should mean you can just set it down on your iron-on. It seems to do OK that way for basic ironing, but it still left shadow creases in my cotton and linen samples. That's probably because linen and cotton usually require steam pressing, but the EasyPress is designed around keeping one's work as moisture-free as possible.

The size and weight of the EasyPress make it difficult to maneuver around curved pieces; the logo I tried to iron on a hat never managed to "take" correctly, and I ended pulling it off.

While the EasyPress might be useful for sheer cafe curtains, I wouldn't chuck my home iron for it.

The EasyPress Mat

The 12" x 12" EasyPress Mat we were given is just a little bit larger than the EasyPress, enough to lay out the design area of an average meant-to-be-tucked-in adult t-shirt, and about the same size as my 12" x 12" Cut 'n Press. (Both 8" x 10" and 16" x 20" EasyPress mats are also available.) Continuing with the "as dry as possible" meme, the mat includes a heat-reflecting inner layer as well as a moisture wicking layer. The mat is flexible and could be rolled if needed.

Placed on a hard table, the EasyPress Mat is about as stiff as a padded ironing board, and not nearly as stiff as the padded side of the Cut 'n Press. The fluffiness of the mat is one reason most iron-ons require the user to press down on the EasyPress.

Setting Up the EasyPress

The EasyPress comes with a quick reference card of settings for the time and temperature needed to adhere different types of iron-on to different types of fabrics and non-fabric surfaces; a more complete chart is available on the website. No matter where you set it last, the EasyPress turns on to a default setting of 250F with a 30-second timer. You press the temperature or time button and the up-and-down arrows to set your temperature between 150 and 360F, and your time between 1 and 300 seconds (5 minutes). The device has a safety timer which will shut it down after 10 minutes of non-use.

While the charts suggest temperatures as low as 185F for delicate fabrics such as silk, and times as low as 10-15 seconds, the average iron-on appears to require 30 seconds at 340F — and as it turns out, the higher temperature didn't seem to harm either my polyester sample or vinyl-on-vinyl layering.

Testing

As noted earlier, my iron-on fabric did not adhere well to my baseball cap. It was fine on one of my t-shirts, though. I'm pretty sure the hat's curvature had a lot to do with that.

My other tests were: reflective HTV on canvas (took a lot of time) and on a t-shirt, regular and metallic HTV on a t-shirt; two varieties of HeatnBond on cotton, welded onto black linen; scraps of regular, metallic, and glitter HTV on linen, and regular HTV on polyester. No matter the heat setting or the amount of time, nothing seemed to burn, char, or do something else. That said, if I forgot to press the countdown button, or wait for the press to come up to temperature, and accidentally laid the press down on a sample, it held fast to the linen fabric when I removed the iron two or three seconds later and the Siser and Cricut carriers even peeled nicely!

Thoughts

The EasyPress is a fun and easy way to  add "iron-ons" to T-shirts, towels, and any surface that can be kept flat and wrinkle free. It's $149.99 price is comparable to a high-end iron, but you don't get the options of steam, spray, vertical steam, and/or cordless operation that those irons provide (and its cord does get in the way), so it's more of a companion tool than a replacement for your trusty household iron. That said, if you do a lot of iron-on, the amount of time it will save you might be well worth the price.

While I work for Michaels, my thoughts on the EasyPress are my own.