How To Screen Print Multiple Colors with Cricut

hey crafty fam it's Alex Vanover back with DIY Alex and I am so excited about bringing you this video because you guys were so excited about my last screen printing video that I wanted to bring you a new tutorial in more detail so in this video I'm gonna show you how to make a screen printing design with multiple colors on the same shirt so I hope you enjoy that and if you have any other questions or anything else you want to learn about screen printing make sure that you tell me in the comments so that I can film a new tutorial for you and if you're new here welcome I'm so glad that you've stumbled on my channel so thanks for being here make sure that you subscribe below and click the bell notification next to subscribe so that you never miss a new upload okay let's get to it so once you're in design space you're going to add a registration marks that is the key to printing multiple colors on one screen printing design so I chose rectangles you can choose any shape that you like and you're going to put four of those shapes on the four corners of your design once you get one the same size then you can just duplicate the rest so that they look exactly the same I lined mine up around the four corners you don't have to do that but you want to make sure that they are a little bit outside your design for the technique that we're going to use later then once your boxes are lined up in a way that you're happy with you want to select all four and attach them once they're attached you want to duplicate the registration marks for as many layers as you have in this case I have two then you're going to line them up so that they match perfectly and next you need to attach all of the same colors to one set of registration marks so I'm selecting all of my gold layers on using the shift key and the right side panel and selecting one set of boxes or registration marks and clicking attach then once that's done I move those out of the way and then I click and drag and select everything else left because I only have one more layer and I attach those as well after that you want to make sure that your registration marks line up perfectly and your design looks good once you feel like you're ready you can go ahead and save your design and once you save you're ready to move on to the make it screen once you're on the make it screen make sure that you turn on mirror for all of your layers so that you can put your designs on the back of your screen then once you're done you're going to set your machine to whatever setting you use for final and you're going to cut it out and then I'll show you what to do next so the first thing that you're going to do after your Cricut cuts out your designs is we're going to reverse weed them and that means that I'm going to weed away the parts of the design that I would normally keep so that we can use the vinyl as a stencil because remember before we cut them out we mirrored them even though you don't normally do that with vinyl so that we can put the designs on the back of the screen if you do get pieces that come up with your vinyl just watch for them as they come and pull them back off the vinyl and place them the best that you can and that is when stab and grab tweezers come in handy because you can do surgery on road pieces of vinyl the stab and grab tweezers are by far the best way to get your vinyl unstuck without distorting it I will go back and fix that piece away the excess vinyl around the design so that I'm not wasting any but you do want to leave somewhat of a border around the design because you're gonna have to tape all the areas that aren't covered by vinyl [Music] so first I'm going to put transfer tape over the top so you want to make sure you lay it on the transfer tape as flat as you can and you also want to make sure that you don't use a super sticky transfer tape because that will make it hard to transfer on to the screen so this is the 6:51 vinyl medium tack transfer tape and that's our best seller that is one of my absolute favorites it's one that I found doesn't make it quite as difficult I typically use the blue grid transfer tape that's also medium TAC but it seems to have a little stronger tack and can be hard to put on the screen now I'm going to flip my design over and burnish it really well and get as many wrinkles out of it as I can the most important place to remove wrinkles is around your design these boxes are just going to be the registration marks so they don't matter if there's wrinkles in the vinyl around them so then I'm gonna remove the vinyls backing and I'm going to transfer my design onto the back of my screen so the front always says speedball so you want to make sure you flip it over to the back mi design is ten inches wide so I decided to flip my screen sideways for this design and I'm going to flip it over and burnish it from the front as well then I just need to remove the transfer tape and you want to do this nice and slowly so that if you need to push your vinyl back down you can for whatever reason I always burnish a little too well and I always have trouble getting this off of the screen but it's still a lot easier with a clear medium TAC versus the blue gray medium tab and since you can see there are some wrinkles because I struggled to get the vinyl off of the transfer tape I'm going to flip over my screen one more time and burnish it so that I make sure the contact is really good and I'm checking around the letters to make sure that the contact with the screen is really good if you have some bubbles in your design or around your design it's not a big deal but basically if you have spots around your letters where there are lumps or bumps you can end up with some bleeding with your screen printing ink [Music] so before I apply the painters tape to all the borders around my registration marks I'm going to line up my design on my shirt so that I make sure that everything is in line make sure that you press your shirt at least a little bit where the design is going to be so there's not a bunch of wrinkles underneath your transfer okay so now that I'm happy with where the screen is I'm going to go ahead and apply my painters tape to all the areas where the vinyl isn't touching the screen it doesn't need to be neat or pretty it just needs to cover the screen you just want to make sure that you're not covering and in any of your design with your tape you can get it super close but you just don't want to get it to cover [Music] I'm just gonna put like a half a piece over top my registration marks because there's just a little bit of shirt showing up top to completely cover your screen with painters tape then you're gonna take index cards and put them underneath each of the registration marks but make sure they're not showing through your design these are going to be a marker for us to place some ink so we can line up our next layer without putting ink on our shirt so make sure that you don't see it through any corners of your design and then you're going to take a piece of painters tape and put it on each index card so that they don't move around you also can use painters tape underneath your registration marks but I like the idea of using index cards better because that way you have more space underneath the registration marks in case there's any bleeding all right so now we're ready to add something to our design so I'm going to use this squeegee this is my favorite type of squeegee that speedball makes it has kind of a silicone bottom with a plastic key top which i think is really neat and then I bought these baskets from the doll knocking excuse me not Dollar Tree from the Walmart pantry organization section there are three for 96 cents and they are the perfect width for your squeegee so that you don't get ink all over the place in between your colors so I always like to use a plastic spoon or fork to get my ink out just because I'm going to throw it away when I'm finished and what you want to do is you want to line the top of your with a fair amount of ink you want to make sure that you have enough to get to the bottom you can add more if you don't but it's nice to start with everything you need and there's virtually no waste with screen printing because you can wipe most of this back into your container so don't worry about using too much so I'm just gonna dab a bunch of this up here try to get it relatively even but okay so now I'll set this aside and it's time to squeegee so I like to hold my squeegee down with one hand and I'm gonna drag it down and I'm going to keep going up to down on my screen I'm not going to go in multiple directions I'm applying even pressure to both sides of my squeegee there yeah I gotta cover this bottom section of my design a little bit better you can go over your design a couple times but you don't want to go over it excessively you're looking to make sure that you don't have any clumps in the middle or anything like that you just want it to look really nice and even and I'm making sure to cover my registration marks so that in the next layer I will know how to line up my boxes need to wipe some of this off so that I can get that line out of the middle of my design so now that there aren't any more lines in my design I'm gonna stick my squeegee back in my basket for a minute and I can remove my first screen and it looks great and these registration marks are left over for my next layer so I'm gonna go and wash out my screen in my kitchen sink and the way that I like to do that is I'm gonna have to peel everything off the vinyl and the tape and then I'm going to use the sprayer in my kitchen sink to spray off all of the ink and that will give this some time to dry and I'll be right back so before I start working on my next layer with my screen I noticed that the bottom of my end got a little messed up so I'm just using a really fine paintbrush and my screen printing ink to touch that up okay that looks pretty good to me so I'm going to set this shirt aside a little bit while it dries and I will probably also hit it with the heat gun to speed up the drying process but in the meantime I will get my second screen ready [Applause] before high transfer tape to this piece of vinyl I'm going to trim the edges again so something I'm gonna try this time to make the transfer tape easier to apply to the screen as I'm only going to burnish with my fingers so now I'm just going to push my transfer tape around my letters with my fingers the best that I can I've done this before and it makes it a lot easier to transfer your transfer tape onto your screen you guys I just poked a hole in my screen I can't believe I did that luckily you can buy other screens on Amazon so that's not a big deal but for the time being I'm gonna tape it on both sides of painters tape just so that I don't get any seepage of my ink I'm gonna tape it on both sides but that's what crafting is all about right just making mistakes and figuring out how to fix them all right so I'm going to take my vinyl off of its backing and place it on the back of the screen I [Music] mean it's so much easier thank God I have registration marks to go by on my shirt so that I don't have to worry about using this section of my prep of my screen and now that I want to firmly press my vinyl onto my screen I'll use a squeegee again that was also a much less intricate design so it's much easier to transfer to the screen so now I'm gonna go ahead and tape up these sides around my vinyl all right so now I'm ready to line up my registration marks and do my second layer so now I'm just gonna line up all four of my registration marks on my screen with the registration marks that I left behind in the last layer when they are perfectly lined up I will know that my design is gonna fit together perfectly so you can see gold through all four of my boxes which is perfect so then I'm just gonna do the same thing I did before this is a much less intense design so I'm not going to use nearly as much but I want to make sure that I don't leave any spots there I'll hold down the screen with one hand and go for it so it looks good after one swipe but I'm gonna do a couple of more in the same direction and I can see a little bit of clumpiness going on so I'm gonna swipe over one more time and that's it so I will wipe my ink back into my jar and then I'll pull off my next screen a little bit on my sleeve there but that's okay I will get that off before it dries and it looks great there's a couple of spots where the vinyl may have stuck to the screen a little bit but it kind of gives it that distressed look and I like it so I always clean off my screen really quickly because that way I don't leave any stains or anything behind on that and after my design is completely dry so I like to let it sit overnight if possible just to make sure that even the thicker parts are completely dry I will heat set this in my heat press at 320 degrees for 40 seconds and that's it that's all it takes to a screen print multiple colors I'm Alex fan over with DIY Alex and if you guys like screen printing make sure that you come back and check out DIY Alex if there's other kinds of videos and tutorials you'd like to see make sure you tell me in the comments that's crafts again soon

Channel: DIY Alex

Views: 763,321

Keywords: cricut, cricut explore air 2, cricut maker, cricut wedding ideas, crafts, easy cricut craft, diy, screen printing, how to screen print, how to, how to screen print with 651 vinyl, screen printing t shirts, oracal 651, screen print with cricut, screen printing with vinyl, speedball, how to screen print multiple colors with one screen, how to screen print multiple colors at home, multicolor screen printing, multicolor screen printing with vinyl, screen print 2 color

Id: VwhgZgk-Ovc

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019