How to Screen Print Using Your Cricut and Vinyl | Screen Printing for Beginners

hey crafty fam it's alex van over welcome back to my craft room and in this video i'm going to show you how to make this super cute screen printed t-shirt using vinyl and your cricut so let's get started so the first step to screen printing is choosing a file that you're going to use for your screen print and when you're a beginner screen printer i highly recommend that you use just a one color really simple image then once you get the hang of the process you can move on to multi-colored prints and other things like that but that's why i chose to use just this simple one color design and as you can see over here on the layers panel every single piece of this design is in separate pieces which means if i take it over to the mat right now it's going to cut all over the place so i'm actually going to select the whole image and i'm going to click weld and remember you only want to do this on items that are the same color and you want to be all one layer otherwise you can use attach but since i just want one layer just like this over here i can use the weld function for this and it's going to work just fine so then i'm going to select the file and i'm going to go up here to the width and i'm going to change it to 10 inches because that's how large i like to use my designs on my shirts and then we're going to go to the make it screen and then once you're on the make it screen you want to be sure to mirror your design so even though we are using permanent adhesive vinyl for screen printing we're still going to mirror the design because we're actually going to put it on the back of the screen and so this is going to make it so that it shows correctly when you flip it over to the front of the screen and another change i'm going to make is i'm going to move my file to actually the middle of my mat and the reason for that is because when you go to screen print you have to actually tape all the edges around where vinyl is not covering it so if we move it to the middle that's a little bit less tape that we have to use when it comes to taping up our design so then once you have it mirrored and moved to the middle of the mat you can click continue and then when your machine connects you can use the vinyl setting for permanent adhesive vinyl and next let's hop over to my machine and i'll show you how to cut and weed your screen printing transfer [Music] so the first step to screen printing is to remove the parts of the vinyl that you would normally keep and that's a method that some people would recall verse reverse weeding but we're basically using the vinyl as a stencil for the screen printing ink and that's why you want to remove all of those pieces so now that the design is all weeded the next step is to apply transfer tape but one of the best tricks that i've learned with transfer tape is first of all to use the least sticky transfer tape that you can possibly find and secondly before you apply it to the vinyl design stick it either to the table or to your shirt and get it a little bit linty before you add it to your design that way it's not quite as tacky because you want it as least tacky as possible when you're applying it to your screen so that you don't have as much trouble removing it so now that i have my transfer tape laid out i'm actually going to flip it over and apply it to my table real quick just like this just enough to get rid of some it doesn't have to be pretty or it doesn't have to be neat it just needs to do the job so now that it's going to be a little bit less tacky i'll go ahead and apply my vinyl to it and i've always found with the clear medium tack from 651 vinyl soon to be 143vinyl.com that it's easiest to lay the transfer tape out and take the vinyl to the transfer tape but you want to do this very slowly and carefully so that you don't get a bunch of wrinkles in your transfer tape or in your design so i like to start at one end like this and then kind of slowly lower it down onto the transfer tape another pro tip that i have for you is in this step to only use your hands when burnishing your transfer tape you don't want to use your squeegee because you don't want your vinyl to get too stuck to your transfer tape all we want it to do is transfer over to the backing we don't want it to get super crazy stuff alright so now we can move the transfer tape out of the way and again i'm literally just gonna burnish with my hands just enough to get the vinyl stuck down to the transfer tape and now it's time to transfer the design over to our screen so i'm gonna be using a speedball screen today i'm actually going to be using a little bit of a larger screen this is a 12 by 18 inch screen just because i wanted a little bit more room on the top and bottom of my design since it is 10 inches by 10 inches i wanted a little bit of margin in the top and the bottom so you don't have to use a screen this large but i like to use it when i have bigger designs like this one so now i'm just going to flip the screen over and this is where we are going to apply our design so first we have to take the vinyl off the backing so we're going to peel the backing away from the vinyl like this this makes it a little bit easier sometimes and i like to use my pin pen to get it started and just watch as you pull up for any of the pieces that decide to stick onto the backing like this little flower center right here and you can just kind of go back over it rub it down again and then keep on pulling and that should take care of it so i'm going to apply it face down like this onto my screen and i'm going to center it on my screen the best that i can and you want to lay this down slowly on the screen so that again you're not getting any wrinkles and initially you can kind of burnish with your hands but then i'm going to flip it over and actually burnish with my squeegee now because you want the vinyl to stick really well so now i'm going to flip my screen back over and remove my transfer tape from the vinyl actually i'm going to burnish my vinyl one more time onto my screen before removing the transfer tape all right and now it's time to remove that transfer tape so i'll just start in a corner and make sure the vinyl is well stuck down and notice that i'm pulling at 180 degrees so i'm not putting any stress on my vinyl and sometimes the permanent vinyl still has a little bit of a hard time sticking you can just ease any pieces that start to come up back down oops so there's another little spot where my vinyl started to come up and that's okay you just go back over it push it back down and keep on pulling sometimes the tweezers are helpful for any of the stubborn pieces that you have oh gosh i missed these up here too i'll come back and fix some of these pieces here in a couple minutes once i get all the transfer tape off there we go and so a really important element of screen printing is to make sure that you have really good contact with all of your vinyl on the screen since it's going to stir serve as your stencil so if you need to use the tweezers or whatever you need to do to pick the vinyl back up and place it well that's really an important step to take in order to get a good print [Music] another thing that you want to keep in mind is that if you get any wrinkles around the outside of your vinyl that's not too big of a deal because this is just protecting the screen printing ink from coming through the screen but you really want these areas around your vinyl to have good contact with the screen so i'm going to flip it over one more time so that i can furnish with the squeegee before we move on [Music] okay so another pro tip that i have for you that makes screen printing a little bit easier is if you line it up on the shirt before you start taping you'll be able to get a better idea of where you're laying it down on your shirt so let me grab my shirt and i'll show you how to lay this out so when it comes time to lay out your shirt the first thing you need to know is that your shirt needs to be relatively wrinkle free so if you're using a t-shirt that has a lot of wrinkles in it i recommend you stick it in your heat press and get most of those wrinkles out so that you get really good contact on your press and the next way that you can help yourself line your shirt up with your design is to use these little dot stickers i learned this trick from jennifer over at pigskins and pigtails she has an amazing youtube channel so if you guys have never seen her work make sure that you go check it out but this little dot trick makes it so much easier to line up your designs so you start by taking one of these dot stickers and you stick it in the center of the collar like this and that just helps you to eyeball where you're going to put your screen so that you know that you need to go approximately three inches below that dot sticker and that way just makes it easier to eyeball so like i said i'm going to go ahead and line this up before i do any taping along the sides or along the bottom and i'll try to line up my the sides of my design along with the collar and see if i think that it's even on both sides and it's a little bit tricky to get used to at first but it gets a little bit easier the more that you do it okay so now that i'm happy with that the next thing to do is apply your painters tape so you're just going to use painters tape to protect your screen all the way along the sides and along this bottom seam so that no ink seeps down onto your shirt and i always like to actually overlap the tape with the sides of my screen like that and that way i am positive that i am well protected from getting any ink on anything so then i'll just go up the sides so then i'll just tape up the sides like this all right and i'm not gonna go all the way over to the edge because i'm only concentrating the ink in the center but if you feel like you're super sloppy with your ink you may want to cover the entire screen with tape i also want to note that you want to make sure that your tape lines overlap fairly well because if they don't ink conceit between the pieces of tape and actually make small lines on your shirt so make sure that you're conscious of that as you're laying out your tape and since the vinyl goes all the way to the top of my screen i'm not going to do any tape up at the top so i think that's going to be good enough but like i said if you feel like you really need to cover all the way to the side you can do that so i always like to have an old kitchen towel nearby so that when i'm finished with my squeegee after screen printing i have a place to put my squeegee where it's not going to get ink all over the place so i recommend that you keep one of those too in order to screen print you want to use water-based screen printing ink for this process i like the speed ball brand but several other brands will work but like i said this is fabric screen printing ink i get a lot of questions about screen printing where people think that this is just fabric paint or watered-down fabric paint but i highly recommend that you use actual screen printing ink because that's what's going to give you the best results you can get it off of amazon and i'll be sure to link it in the description for you so in order to screen print you're just going to open up your jar of ink and i like to use a plastic spoon and you're going to lay a pretty good thick line of ink all along the top of your design and you want to make sure that you go just outside the um limits of your design so that you don't leave any of your design uncovered when you begin to swipe your squeegee down and you can be really really generous with your ink because the ink can actually be put back in the jar so if you don't end up using it all you can always put some back so don't worry about using too much and once you feel like you have a good thick line up at the top you're going to use your squeegee to swipe down in an even medium pressure motion this is a 12 inch squeegee also from speedball and the reason i'm using a little bit of a bigger squeegee is because i want my squeegee to be wider than my design i used to use a nine inch squeegee but since a lot of my designs are 10 inches i was having to cover two different swipes for my design and i decided that this works a lot better so if you're making bigger designs like i am i recommend a 12-inch squeegee by speed ball so you're just going to put the squeegee up above a lot of the ink i like to hold the screen down with one hand just to make sure that i don't get any movement and like i said you just want a slow and steady medium pressure swipe all the way down your design and when you're finished you want to make sure that you don't see any areas that are extra splotchy or anything like that so i'll do one more swipe with medium pressure over the top and when you feel like you are happy with that i'm gonna set my squeegee down then you can hold on to the shirt and lift up on your print and there you have it a super cute perfectly positioned screen print now it's really important that you wash your screen really really fast because the ink can stain the screen so i'm going to go wash my screen off and i have a separate video on how to do that if you want to check that out i'll put it up in the youtube card up in the corner if you want to see all the details about cleaning your screen but i'll be right back to show you the rest of the process so in order for water-based screen printing ink to become permanent it needs to be heat set after it's dry so the next step after your screen printing and after you've washed off all of your equipment is to let your shirt dry now if you have a thicker layer of ink you may want to let it dry as long as overnight but if you have a very thin even layer like this i'm going to use a heat gun and give it maybe an hour or so and then i'll show you how to heat seal your water-based ink so that it's washable super super durable and a great process for those of you who don't like the feel of htv or if you're making lots of shirts at the same time with the same design screen printing is an amazing option [Music] so after your shirt is completely dry then it needs to be heat set and you want to do this at 320 degrees for 40 seconds i'm going to be using my heat press but you can also heat set with an iron or an easy press i also have a teflon sheet met um stuck with magnets to the top of my heat press and if you're not positive that your shirt is dry i would also recommend protecting your heat source with either a teflon sheet or a piece of parchment paper so that you don't get any ink onto your heat source in case your shirt isn't dry after your shirt is heat set the water-based ink is completely permanent it's totally washable and it's going to last a really really long time if we haven't already connected on social media i would love to see your work so please be sure to tag me at diy alex van over that's how you can find me on most major social platforms but i'll also put links down in the description directly to all my social media platforms so that you can connect super easily and if you want to learn more about screen printing i have tons of screen printing videos already on my channel so click right here to check out that playlist and if you haven't already please make sure to click right here to subscribe to the diy alex youtube channel scroll down just a little bit and ring the bell right next to subscribe so that you never miss when i upload a new video fridays at 8pm eastern time i hope we can craft again soon

Channel: DIY Alex

Views: 130,498

Rating: 4.9701829 out of 5

Keywords: How to Screen Print Using Your Cricut and Vinyl, Screen Printing for Beginners, screen printing with your Cricut, water based screen printing, Cricut Design Space tutorial, 651 vinyl, diy alex, screen printing, screen print, how to, tutorial, cricut, cricut explore air 2, cricut maker, crafts, easy cricut craft, diy, how to screen print, how to screen print with 651 vinyl, screen printing t shirts, oracal 651, screen print with cricut, screen printing with vinyl, speedball

Id: Mrv7PU1lU04

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020