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.

It Still Doesn't Register...

Registration: the alignment of multiple processing passes on the same sheet of paper, so a single multicolor or multiprocess image is produced. 

Coming from the world of photography and printing, I see perfect registration as a requirement to make sure my images and cut works line up so there's no offset of one color to another, or of image to cut. It's something I expect of any color printer — and which, until now, I expected to be standard for any cutting machine. If I have to manually align a paper for multiple passes, I'll set my program to print the registration marks which allow me to perform the alignment myself.

One of the issues I've been having with getting my Cricut to do what I want it to is its inconsistency in registering to the same spot on its cuttting mat, or — more importantly — to the material on the cutting mat. This is annoying because it makes it difficult to do precision cuts on unusual shapes, and to do registered cuts on preprinted materials — such as personalized cupcake wrappers and flags for an event.

Cupcake flag and wrapper for New Jersey Libertarian Party event

Cricut's Design Space has a "print and cut" feature which is supposed to make this sort of thing easy: print your design out onto an appropriate paper through Design Space, which adds registration marks to your graphics, and then cuts out the intricate shapes of your printed item.

There are some problems with this:
1. The maximum size of a print-and-cut graphic is about 9" x 6", which is nowhere near the size of the standard cutting mat, and a bit small for adult t-shirts.
2. The "print" part of print-and-cut is much too low a resolution to be useful
3. The "cut" part of print-and-cut either tries to cut out every single color change, causing the knife to shred the project, or only cuts the outlines of the printed portion (as if you were making a sticker), with no obvious option for anything different.

DIY'ing the sequence isn't much better. While you can print and adjust to the entire size of the sheet, the cutting will end up in different areas from one mat feed to the next. A few YouTubers have suggested that adding a bounding box at the edges of your image (or paper) will help with registration, but I've not found it a perfect match.

The red rectangle is my Cricut's DIY "registration" marks for US letter-size paper

That said, there's one additional step that looks like it might help (though it may "ruin" a mat): I ran an old mat through the Cricut several times with the bounding box set to "write" and found that my Cricut has a specific offset for 11 x 8.5" paper and cardstock (US standard letter size paper, matted landscape). If I set my letter-sized paper to the marks I've made on the mat, I'm getting something closer to a usable registration, if not what I would consider acceptable registration.

Registration Errors

Note that the bounding lines on the flags and some of the wrappers are visible, and how they vary from cupcake to cupcake.

On the plus side, after a lot of trial and error (and wasted cardstock), I got the Cricut to cut everything out without mangling the pre-printed images. On the minus side, I still had those outline marks. Since this was a bit of a test project, I went with the stock I managed to print out. For future events, I can "hide" the outline layer so it won't print, and my cupcake flags and wrappers should be perfect.

I Hear Cricuts...

If you spend any amount of time in a craft store or among paper crafters, you will hear them toss about words like Cuttlebug, Sizzix, Spellbinders, Silhouette, Cameo, and Cricut. Each of these are machines that help a crafter create precise embossed or cut shapes that can be assembled to make three-dimensional cards, scrapbook page accents, centerpieces and other specialized paper goods for special events, including custom favor boxes. A family with a couple of Cricut machines and a lot of time can save enough money creating their wedding, shower, or baby-naming supplies to pay for the cost of these expensive cutters and the amount of time it takes to learn how to use some of them.

Because I'm not into scrapbooking or planners, and I don't have children or nearby family, I don't have a direct need for these machines; however, many Michaels customers purchase consumables for them, and some even earn their incomes by using them. That means it's a good idea for me to understand how they work.

Our classroom includes a Sizzix Big Kick, a Cricut Expressions, and several dies and embossing folders for the Sizzix. The Sizzix is pretty straightforward: you put your paper on a plate, put your die on it, put another plate on top, and crank it through the machine. Then you take your pieces and assemble them.

The Cricut is another matter entirely. The Expressions model has a small number of built-in images and fonts, but mostly relies on proprietary data cartridges for your projects and designs. You use an awkwardly slow built-in display to try to lay these out in a way that either makes sense or wastes the least amount of consumable materials — or you can (or rather could) use a USB connection and a PC program (Cricut Craft Room) to try to manage things more quickly. Then you prepare your materials and tell the machine to do its work. Later Cricut models (the Explore series and the current top-of-the-line Maker) use different software (Cricut Design Space) that (hallelujah!) allows you to upload your own designs, rather than just relying on cartridges and whatever Cricut has made available through their online space.

It's that ability to do truly custom work that has had me interested in playing with the Cricut Explore series, and that past tense that has gotten me to finally purchase what, for me, is an expensive toy: Cricut shut down Craft Room on July 15. The nominal reasons for the shutdown is because the software is based on Adobe Flash, which is (1) insecure and (2) no longer supported by Adobe.

As part of the Craft Room sunset program, Cricut generously offered Craft Room users a significant credit towards purchasing a Design Space-compliant model, valid through July 15. I waited almost until the last minute before taking the leap and buying a Cricut Explore Air with a basic set of starter tools. Now, I'm working on translating some of the logos my organizations use into Design Space-friendly files and and trying out some ideas for custom decorations for our events.

Once I get the hang of the translations, I'll be able to see what sort of market might exist to give me some return on this investment...

Hand Lettering: Brushing Off Cursive Writing for Calligraphy

Much to my surprise, calligraphy is becoming popular again.

Back in my college days, schoolteachers observed that teaching beginning writers a calligraphic hand — either as opposed to, or in addition to, Cursive Writing — had the happy result of students with better, more legible handwriting. Since "Penmanship" (handwriting, with the goal of accurately replicating standard letter forms at all times and speeds) was my worst grade in school, I felt compelled to take up the study.

By the time I graduated, I had a stash of several Osmiroid left-hand fountain pens (yes, I'm left-dominant!) in both standard and my preferred oblique styles, several Speedball handles and an assortment of nibs, a handful of India and colored inks, and a preference for writing ornamental "text" hands on smooth vellum paper.

Vintage Calligraphy Supplies

While I've practiced on and off during the intervening years, (and added a Platignum set and a few Rotring fountain pens to my stash), I put my pens and inks away (I'd thought for good!) when it became simpler and easier to specify a typeface and size on my computer (I usually had several hundred faces installed at any given time) than to struggle with letterforms and slants that didn't stay as straight and as perfect as I would have liked.

While Michaels has sold a limited number of calligraphy pens and inks over the past several years, most customers were only interested in calligraphy markers — whether the Zig memory, Recollections (our house brand), or Speedball Elegant Writer. I've always associated these markers with dull corners, uneven edges, and dried-out inks — nothing worthy of the effort of fine lettering. (Then again, many professional calligraphers feel the same about steel pens as opposed to hand-cut quills and reeds...)

In the past year or so, our calligraphy offerings have expanded. We now have a couple of Manuscript brand sets, as well as a Speedball set or two, a set of Asian calligraphy brushes, and two lines of calligraphy ink.

So, too, has the range of popular calligraphy — although to make it less scary, we're calling it "hand lettering". And instead of using scary, blotty, messy dip pens (or slightly less scary, but still blotty and messy flat-tip fountain pens), we're using brush markers. And the letterforms we're teaching look more like Copperplate than Chancery Italic or Fette Fraktur.

Marker-Calligraphy Supplies

(Which, frankly, is making Copperplate seem a whole lot less scary to me.)

Of course none of pens we sell are designed for lefties, which is one of the reasons I've had to haul my stash out of storage. (The other main reason is to try to give my colleagues a feel for what our calligraphy customers might ask about or need.)

The latest "trend" in this craft area, which our buyers and merchandisers would like to believe is leading this return to hand-lettering, is "journaling". Like "planning", this seems to be an underdefined category. Our "journaling" aisle includes blank books for sketching, visualization, vacation planning, bucket-lists, to-do lists, and possibly even some diary-writing and creative writing. (There's a better-defined subsection of this area called "Bible Journaling", which I would suspect relates to individual and directed Bible study, and includes pocket inserts such as "Prayer Lists".)

During the process of preparing for tonight's "Hand Lettering" class, I've picked up and experimented with several types of brush marker, purchased some left-handed calligraphy markers, and started resurrecting my old dip pens. Unfortunately, both Osmiroid and Platignum have left the calligraphy-pen market, and while I have the tips, my old barrels are nowhere to be found. Surprisingly, though, a few of my inks — at least one of which bears the price tag from its purchase over 35 years ago — are still good. Time to get some new parchment, vellum, and chain-and-laid paper, and start playing with letters again.

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part V

As you may recall, I spent some time this fall gathering different brands of fabric medium, different brands and qualities of acrylic paints, and testing them all at different dilution levels to find which would be the optimal combination for painting T-shirts.

The delay in posting the concluding part (parts?) to this experiment was a delay in heat-treating, curing, and washing the test T-shirts.

While the paint swatches were more flexible when warm, I'm not sure how much heat treating did for the preservation of the paint work.

More important is, how well did the samples survive the wash, and how wearable the paint/medium combinations are.

The yellow Liquitex acrylic ink pretty much disappeared into the red t-shirt, but it was fairly transparent to begin with. The more fabric medium in the mix, the less it seems to disappear into the fabric. It's fine on a lighter color fabric, such as the bleached areas on my Boo Christmas t-shirt, and no fabric medium was needed for that application.

The Golden High Flow paint//ink was soft enough without fabric medium, and looks like the Delta Ceramcoat and Americana fabric mediums have minimized what looks like a very minor amount of bleeding of the unadulterated paint.

Without fabric medium, the Golden Fluid and Liquitex Soft Body paints come out as similar textures to the various brands of craft paint, but with brighter color due to their higher concentrations of pigment — which is pretty much the same as before anything was heat-treated or washed. That said, neither is completely opaque.

In general, the thicker the paint, the stiffer the sample patch, even with fabric medium and washing. The thicker paints and applications (e.g., two coats) were also more likely to crack.

Of the craft paints, Folk Art gave the softest finish; it and Martha Stewart are the best for opacity.

The odd swatches of specifically-formulated "fabric paint" were a bit softer than their craft-paint equivalents, but not necessarily more opaque.

My patches of Elmer's "washable" School Glue did not wash out of the shirt, but I'm not sure if that's because I let it set in too long.