How to Make a Sublimation Tumbler that is Crisp, Vibrant, and Has No Ghosting

hi guys thanks for joining me today I'm Marilyn now I do all things crafty but on today's video I'm going to show you how I made this sublimation tumbler now this tumbler is for a friend of mine we have been best friends since we were six years old she turned 60 today and I'm getting ready to surprise her tonight now I made her a birthday Queen rhinestone shirt you might have seen me make on video I gave that to her last weekend at a funeral but she has no idea that I'm showing up today for her birthday her family is having a birthday dinner for her and myself and three other of our high school friends were crashing the party so we're putting together this birthday basket and this is one of the things that I'm going to put in it so if you're interested in seeing this stay tuned as for me I have to drive almost four hours so I need to go get ready and get on the highway here's what I plan to use for the video and I usually forget something so if I did I'll put a title at the bottom and you can see what else I might use I have my image and of course it's backwards right now because when you sublimate things are backwards but it says most people call me Carol but you can call me birthday queen and I love this design this came in a file that had tons of things you could add to it but I designed it to look similar to one I did for myself a long time ago now I first fell in love with this file when I saw a lady named Patty use it a long time ago at that time in design bundles I think it was twelve dollars I ended up joining creative Fabrica and I found it and I got it free as part of my membership like I said it has a ton of things that will go on it I just kept mine pretty simple then I have a Subway fun Tumblr press right here it will do 20 ounce 30 ounce I don't remember what other ounces but it will do those and then I have a straight skinny tumbler that is a 20 ounce and this is also from Subway fun so the first thing I want to do is go ahead and clean this now this might be a step you can skip but I always do it just to be careful so this is just 90 rubbing alcohol and then I'm just using two paper towels one to clean it with and one to dry it off with now I move my print out of the way because you never want to get alcohol or really any liquid on your prints so this is really all there is to it this would dry really quickly because it's alcohol but I go ahead and use a dry one just to make sure it's dry now other things that I'm going to use is some heat tape my rotary cutter I'm going to use my ruler to guide my rotary cutter then I have some butcher paper and and some heat gloves I'll grab those before I get started now for my image I often have people ask me what size did you make your image and it really depends on your tumblers I've had different size tumblers even though they were both 20 ounce skinnies and so you'll really need to just cut out a template and see if it fits your tumbler now there's nothing in this design that was so finicky that I can't cut it down so I made this 9.4 wide by 8.2 tall and I fully expect to have to cut it down some now what I want to do is I want to make sure that at least on one side I get all the white off because if you leave white on both sides you're going to get a white stripe on your tumbler and so what I do is I cut a little bit of the design off on one side and then I leave a little bit of the white on the other and I'll show you more what I'm talking about in just a minute now whatever way works well for you to cut paper feel free to use that method when I use my pull down or even my slide across sometimes I'll Bunch up the paper so I found I get the best results with a rotary blade okay so you whoops you can see there is a tiny bit of the design on that end then on this end just so I make sure it's large enough I'm going to get all the way over off the design I might be even with the end of it but I don't really want to cut off any of the design so there's a tiny bit of white and that's fine now at the bottom of your tumblers because they're slightly beveled or rounded you can have a little bit of white showing down there but what I like to do at the top of the tumbler is I like the paper to be almost exactly even with the top and so for that reason I'm going to cut off all the white and again just slightly into the design so again there's a tiny bit of Ink on there all right so now let's do a reality check and see how much more I'm going to have to cut off the way I like to do this is I like to turn my tumbler upside down and I don't like to handle it too much after I've cleaned it then I put my paper upside down against the table now it's a good size going around it but there's way too much extra above it or below it so I can chop off part of the bottom part of the top or a little bit of each in my case I think I'll start at the bottom and I'm going to use the grid marks on my cutting mat to try to get this pretty straight now I feel confident I can cut that much off hopefully I'm not wrong all right so let's dry fit this again and that is almost perfect so it's even with it at this end there's just a tiny bit that's going to go around the bottom so I like that now remember I have a little bit of white here so this side will have to be on the bottom and this side on top now that I have it all straight I go ahead and lay my tumbler down sometimes I use a little cradle that I made okay the tops even the Bottom's not quite even I'm not too concerned about that and for now I'm just going to put one piece of tape on the top all right let me check me okay so the top is toward me so I'm going to put one piece of tape on the top and then pull it over really really snugly and press it down now it's pretty much even with the top but what I do is I put my hand in it and I just kind of try to get the paper to move slightly so that it is just barely above the top all right I think that's good so I'm not gonna have you sit through all of this but now what I do is I take a long piece of tape I put it along that side now I'm not pressing it down on this side yet because I want to squeeze those together and then press that down and then this one I'm going to pull it over the top just to kind of keep the paper in place then the exact same thing on the bottom but I don't necessarily have to have that going over the bottom squeeze it together get it as tight as I can and now I'm ready to do the top seam now even though there was a little bit beyond the Curve it still isn't touching the table so it's not pushing my paper up all right so this is the top piece now I've changed this a little bit I used to do two rows the first row even with the top and then the second row above the top to really pull it over I'm going to try to get away with just doing one row of tape here okay now when I do this and you want to get it pretty straight not as crooked as I did but when you do this the way I knew it is I stretch this tape really tight so that I get a little bit of a rebound effect meaning it's trying to pull the paper in and so that looks good and I like to kind of push my paper up against my cup go all the way around it and then pressing it straight over the top and down into the cup now it looks like I have one little Gap here I didn't get that's probably okay but actually I don't know if you can see it but it's trying to Gap there I don't know if you can see that hopefully you can but it's trying to Gap because it's so tight everywhere else and be a little bit away from the top what that can do is that can cause a blank white space or a fuzzy space at the top so now I'm pulling really tight on that and then pressing it over okay so now I'm going to just investigate the top of my cup and see if I see any gaps and if I do I'm going to try to rub those out I think that looks good so now I'm going to do pretty much the same thing on the bottom [Music] and so I'll just fast forward through this part now the last thing that I want to do you could use your fingernail you could use a credit card I have this little scraper tool so I want to First go on one side of the seam and really press down on that then I'm going to go on the top side of the seam and really press down on that as well is this doing anything I don't know but it makes me feel better so I do it when I first started out I had several tumblers that were just substandard so I probably am a little bit extra on what I do but I usually really like the results now before I even turn this on I want to see if the pressure is set to the right place so I'm just going to put that in there and that seems so well I thought it seemed a little bit loose here's the weird thing when this heats up not only the cup expands but it seems like this pad expands so I think I'm going to leave it alone now I do want to make sure there's an even Gap it looks like the Gap here is a little bit larger so I'll adjust that side all right let's go ahead and take it out and then turn it on Let it start heating up now there's a green button on this side so I'm just going to press that and then I think it's going to heat up to what it was defaulted to before let me see all right 385 that's the temperature for 45 seconds I think that's good I used to do them 50 seconds turn it 50 seconds turn it 20 seconds turn it 20 seconds turn it I've backed off that just a little bit so I'm going to go ahead and stay with 45 seconds foreign because on this side there's nothing obstructing where you put the tumbler in and on this side you have the cord that goes from the machine to your pressing pad and so I like to slip it in from this side when I do it from that side on videos it feels like I'm just fighting with it so I have a piece of butcher paper and all I do is I put my tumbler inside the butching I put my tumbler inside the butching I put my tumbler inside the butcher paper and I make sure I know where the seam is I want to start with the seam either backwards or forwards okay so in this case I've moved the seam to the back so it's going to be straight back now when I close that it starts counting down automatically when the 45 seconds goes off I'm going to rotate that 180 degrees so that seam is going to be at the front now this time when the timer goes off I'm going to rotate that just 45 degrees and then heat it for about 20 more seconds then I'll take it out and put it on a ceramic tile now notice that the paper is kind of burnt and that's just normal what I want to do is I want to unwrap this enough just to see if I feel like it's ready it is still extremely hot so be careful with this part foreign just snip into the tape then I can just pull that apart now obviously if I need to put this back in the Press I'll need to replace that so I'm going to just peel this down far enough to see oh that looks good do you want to see I'm gonna let it cool off just a minute get my camera turned around and then I'll show you what it looks like now it's been about four or five minutes and I can easily handle this I'm still going to be really careful because I didn't get a look at the front side now if this is done well I assume the front side will be oh my goodness it's beautiful whoops sorry about that scratching noise that was the paper scratching on it that is gorgeous now my friend loves yellow so that's why I went with the yellow design and you see right there most people call me Carol but you can call me birthday Queen so pretty now you're gonna see the seam because they're different colors that looks good now when I showed the tops of these the camera light glares so you kind of have to watch it go all the way around it still looks like it's picking up a glare but the top looks great let's look at the bottom the bottom looks great those colors are beautiful I think she's gonna love this so as soon as her surprise dinner tomorrow is over I'll go ahead and get this scheduled to upload the next day I hope you've enjoyed it and until my next video bye bye

Channel: Making with Marilyn

Views: 250,501

Keywords: sublimation, sublimate, sublimating, how to sublimate a tumbler, sublimation tumbler

Id: W5MedamnkJs

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023