How to Sublimate on Ceramic Ornaments (both sides at the same time) using a Heat Press or Easy Press

in this video I'm going to show you how to sublimate on this ceramic ornament using [Music] sublimation hey everyone and welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is Carly and I love teaching all things crafts Cricket lasers sublimation anything that you can DIY I probably have tried it so in today's tutorial I will be showing you some ceramic ornaments that are made for sublimation if you've never heard of sublimation I do have a tutorial that will walk you through what is sublimation and how to do it and I also have a playlist of some additional videos so if you've never heard of it go check out those videos and then come back here for this tutorial in this tutorial we'll be using these sublimation ceramic ornaments from pyd life These are really cool because they are double-sided so each side can be sublimated and you can either sulate one side at a time so you just sublate one side and leave the back blank or you can sulate both sides at the same time so I'm going to show you how to sulate both sides first and then I will show you why you shouldn't do one side at a time and just do one side if you opt to do it that way so let's let's get started and I will show you everything you need to know from designing to printing to pressing to design our project I'm using Adobe Illustrator but you can use whatever program you'd like to design with you just need access to some basic shapes so I like to create a template to represent what my ornament will look like so I'm going to use this shape icon here and then right click it to grab the ellipse tool I'm going to click on my art board and then I'm going to make a few circles the first circle is going to to be 3.2 by 3.2 and I do want to turn a stroke onto this so I'm going to make my stroke one point and I'm going to leave it black so this will be the bleed of our image so that when we're placing our transfer if for whatever reason our image is a little bit off this will kind of be our security that we're not going to have any weight so this is bigger than our ornament our ornament is actually only about 3 in big so to represent our ornament I'm going to grab the ellipse tool again and I'm going to click and I'm going to add a 3-in circle move this off to the side for a second the hole for ornament is about 25 in so we'll draw a25 in circle and then it's about2 from the top you want to measure your ornament exactly so if I wanted to use this as a reference I I could just copy and paste and then copy and paste so that I know where 0.25 is so about that far down if yours is closer you can always just measure and then move it up exactly so I'm not going to fuss too much since my circle won't be in the way of my image but if you are drawing your own template and you want it to be exact make sure to measure the distance perfectly we'll make sure that this is aligned and then so I can show you what's going to happen next I'm going to change this from a stroke to a fill by clicking this swap fill and stroke and you can see right now I have two black circles on top of each other and I'm going to open the Pathfinder window if you don't have access to the Pathfinder window you'll want to come up to the top choose window and then Pathfinder and then it will open up for you and I'm going to choose minus front so now you can see that I have a template of what my ornament looks like we'll flip that back to a stroke and then I'm going to place it on top and we'll just make sure that those are aligned Center so that everything's lined up so this will be our template and now I'm going to show you how to use it in two different examples we'll use a photo and then we'll also use an image to open a photo I just chose the finder window and then I'm going to grab the art that I want to print we'll use this image drag it into illustrator and it will pop in okay so art is in there and I'll resize it you can use a photo um or an image PNG whatever you'd like and for this we want to send this to the back so I'm going to right click and say arrange send to the back and now you can see why this hole is beneficial because if I were to place my windmill and it got cut off by the hole then I would lose it in my final print so I want to make sure that I place my art where I get as much detail as I want to include and then I'm going to make a copy of these two two circles so that I have them for additional projects and then I'm going to select the outside Circle and my image so I have my outside Circle selected and the art that I want to have on my ornament and I'm going to rightclick and choose make a clipping mask and you can see that that has cut my art down to a circle now the only part on the ornament that will show is anything within this black line so most of his body will be chopped off just his head and his shirt will be showing but that's okay so the outside is a bleed just so that you don't have any white on your ornament hopefully will make sense when I am actually Printing and transferring these images so next I want to delete this black line because I don't actually want that pressed onto my ornament and then I'm going to choose object transform and reflect I like to reflect on my artboard so that I don't forget to do that when I'm printing I'm going to make a cop Cy since I want this to be a double-sided ornament and then I'm going to paste it next I'm going to turn my ornament 180° that way when I print this I will be able to sandwich my ornament between it I like to put about 3/4 of an inch between them so if I click on a rectangle and do 75 I can use that as a reference to make sure that my distance is accurate let's add a stroke onto that so you can see it so we'll just line these all up and now our artwork is ready to print for the ornament the next image I want to add is just this little image here and I'm going to use my template the same exact way so I'm going to make sure that I'm not cutting anything off with the circle and that it's positioned where I want it so I'm just eyeballing it but you can use your align tools and line that up exactly how you want it I have my image ready to go I want to remove my template but before I delete it I'm going to grab this one and just move it off to the side in case I want to use it for additional images and then I'm going to increase the weight of this up to two points one point would probably be fine but I do want to be able to see the weight of the line through my paper going to group these together so they don't move on me and then I'm going to transform and reflect now it's mirrored going to make a copy of that bring it down here don't forget to rotate this one so we can use the arrow tool or we can transform and rotate and you'll want to rotate at 180° the most important thing is that they're lined up Center so you can see that those were not lined up Center we'll just double check on this I think I did this already perfect okay and then if you want to do multiple you can just copy and paste them so that you can use all your paper so now we're ready to go and we're ready to print this I have my printer turned on and my paper already loaded so I have a surec color f170 if you don't have a sublimation printer and you want to know how to convert an Epson Eco tank I do have videos on that I also have a review on the epon Shure color f170 if you'd like to see that so to print it I'm going to choose file print and I want to make sure that my page setup matches the paper I'm using so I'm using legal siiz paper and you can see that my image a little cut off so I want to make sure to drag it into my printpal area and then I'm going to set up my actual print settings so I'm going to choose my printer and then down on printer options I want to choose color matching and I have mine turned on to color sync and then I have the color profile that comes with my Epson Epson controls colors works great if you have everything Epson already but I always just choose the profile that comes with my printer just to make sure that adobe doesn't mess with my colors then I'm going to choose print settings and I'm using a rigid blength so I want to make sure it's on Rigid not text style and then I want my print quality Define I've already set up my images to mirror so I can turn that off and I'm going to click okay and print and then print one more time while this is printing I'm going to power on my heat press we're setting it for 360° the highest time that my press goes to is 99 seconds I need 250 seconds so we'll hack that just a little bit unfortunately for the HTV R Auto press that's as high as it goes all right so our print is done you can see it printed out and the colors are very dull that's normal for sublimation so your colors will transfer a lot more more Vivid so you can see here's my transfer and then here's what it looks like printed so very muted so you've cut them apart you'll fold them in half and I just kind of hold it up to the light so I can see where to fold it and then just line up my circles and it's actually a lot easier with these images with the black lines you might even be able to see it when I do it but if I fold this in half you can kind of see the lines through the paper and it makes it really easy to line them up and just fold it right in half because everything is nice and dark to see so I do feel like that black bleed line you need so that you can line up your image so now they're folded in half and line up perfectly I have a sheet of butcher paper I'm going to place my ornaments inside of and really I should use something to carry this over as well because the hardest part for me is is carrying over my ornaments once I place them in my little sandwich situation so to line it up I'm going to place my ornament in the center of my circle again you can see how beneficial that circle is because I can easily line it up and make sure that it's centered because I can't see to the other side then I'm going to fold my sandwich over and make sure that it's lined up I did find it easy to easier to lift it up and again use the light to make sure everything's lined up so if you find it easier you can line everything up and then kind of just pinch it in place and then once you're ready you can place it down and tape it they also have adhesive spray where you can spray one side of your ornament and then attach it down I definitely want to try and order some of that but if you're like me and don't have that you can do it without it you just want to make sure that everything is lined up and then you'll tape it down into place so once you're happy I'm going to tape it it right to my butcher paper so that it doesn't move when I carry it over I'll do the same thing for the next ornament I'll just want to make sure that my hole for my ornament is in the place that I want it and you can see that bleed is really helpful for positioning my image and then I'll just fold it on top and for this one I can actually feel where the ornament is and I know that the image will cover it completely and we'll just tape that into place I'm going to trim off this excess side so that I can tape it down and then cover it up like this with my butcher paper and then carefully carry it over to my press so once it's in your press I'm using the HTV R Auto press like I mentioned I do have a few pain points with this press one of them is the timer and the other one is you do need to use this pad when pressing because if you don't you will snap your ornament so I cracked an ornament because I decided to take it off I wanted a little bit more pressure don't do that you do want something with a little bit of give under it so if you're using a traditional heat press you'll want to make sure that your pressure is not set super high because you don't want to crack your ornaments so it works fine like this with the pad and just the regular pressing settings but if you're using a heat press where you need to turn a knob for your pressure settings you'll want to use a lighter pressure so I'm going to set this in here and then I'm going to start [Music] this the Press will automatically come down and adjust the pressure onto my ornaments and I'm going to press this for the 99 seconds and then repress it for 99 seconds and then press it for an additional 52 seconds to get all the way up to the 250 seconds that's recommend it so my time's about up I'm going to click this again to just restart it and repress so that it doesn't come all the way back up and then have to go all the way back down on this last one instead of waiting for it to completely exhaust the timer I will take it out around the halfway mark so I do have to kind of babysit the machine and make sure that I don't press it too long so we'll wait until about the 50c mark and then we'll pop it out so I just open up my heat press and then I'll pull it out power this off this will be super hot so you can either let it cool down completely or use heat resistant gloves and peel off the tape it's up to you do not try to go in there and touch it right away or try to hold the ceramic because it will be super hot do as I say not as I do I did peel this while it's still kind of hot so I'm going to just shift that over there move that out of the way all right as I said do as I say not as I do these are still a little bit warm to the touch but I did want to show you the results I think that the full bleed image looks so good you can see that the image the ornament shape is a little bit smaller than 3 in so you can see I kind of lost that guy so if you want to make your image shape just a little bit smaller so you you get a better accurate representation of what you're going to cut off I don't mind that he was cut off but I thought I should show you here's the back not perfectly lined up but pretty good for a double-sided ornament and the quality and the print transfer quality is so good so there's the full bleed image and then the milk and cookie one really crisp super clear INF Focus image I did have a little bit of an issue on the S on this one you can see that it's a little bit blurry that means that I didn't have enough pressure on my print so that could have been a taping issue but not enough to where it bothers me so there they are the image does wrap around the edges just a little bit so I do think that gives it a really cool professional finish when you have an image that goes all the way to the edge so I do think the full bleed looks really awesome and then they do include gold string of course you can swap this out with whatever you'd like so the easiest way that I found to do this was to Loop it through and then pull your Tails through the loop I did add a knot right at at the top because I felt like it wasn't holding in place so I knotted it and brought that knot all the way down to the bottom so that it didn't fall off my ornaments since these are very fragile ornaments and then just knot it one more time up at the top and now your ornaments ready to hang on the tree so when I first did these ornaments I was asking myself why do you have to press the image at the same time why wouldn't I be able to press this side and then go back and press press the second side that would be a lot easier to line up and you know made more sense to me unfortunately I tried to do that so I pressed one side and then I went back and pressed the other and what happens is the first side that you press when you're pressing it the second time it heats up the image and the ink turns back into a gaseous State and starts leaving your project blank so it just dissipates into the butcher paper the surrounding area so this was the first side I pressed and it looked great when I came out of the press and then I went back to press the other side and when I took it out the original side had completely lightened up and lifted out of the ornament so that's why you can't press one side and then the other if you're looking to do a double-sided ornament if you're looking to do a single-sided ornament you can absolutely just press one side and then leave the back blank so I will show you how to tape an ornament down and what I think you should do for best results if you're just doing one side so you can see here this looks really good the font is super clear it's in Focus there's no fuzziness and then this one not sure if you can tell on camera but this one is just out of focus a little bit if you look at the nose of the dog the one with the gold ribbon on it is just a little bit more clear and the way that I did that is I pressed it upside down so it went into my heat press like this whereas this one went face up so I'm going to show you how to do that in just a second a few other issues that I just want you to be aware of are cracking your ornaments I mentioned this when we were pressing the double-sided ornaments but if you're using a heat press when the hot plate comes into contact unless you have something with a little bit of give underneath it it will snap your ornament so with my HTV ROM press I had the squishy pad that comes with the machine and when I use my Starcraft press the rubber underneath or the silicone pad underneath it it did give it enough give but I had to do super low pressure if I did any tight or medium pressure it would stap my ornaments so if you're using a traditional heat press make sure to use super light pressure one last thing I wanted to mention if you are using the fold over method you want to make sure that you tape down your blanks really well because if they move when you're bringing them over to your press or if you don't tape them down while they're on the bed of your press you could end up with some unwanted black marks if you're using the file technique that I'm using which is a risk to add these black lines but I feel like they're so helpful when lining up your image that I feel like it's worth the risk because as long as they're outside of your ornament surface they're really helpful but if you accidentally move your ornament you may end up with some unwanted black lines so make sure that you give yourself enough bleed and you line those up and tape them down really well so it's that being said let's do a single ornament and I'm going to show you on one of my ornaments that I used already I'm going to use this ornament that didn't turn out exactly how I wanted it to it just was a little blurry the one I showed you earlier so I'm going to use the backside as a practice so you can see and if you've handled the ornament a lot you'll want to make sure to wipe it down with a microfiber cloth just to get any fingerprints off of it any hand oils and any dust so that your transfer will adhere to it really well so there's a little bit of Ink on there but that's okay since this is just a sample so we're going to line it up the same way want to make sure that's it's straight and I'm going to place it right on top I'm going to tape this down so you can see what happens to the top side of this ornament and why you wouldn't be able to press your image double-sided like this so I'm going to place it tape it down in the center of my ornament I have my butcher paper and I'm just going to place my ornament with my transfer down at the bottom and my ornament on top you also can use an easy press for this process so you can place your butcher paper your transfer on the bottom then your ornament then your butcher paper and you would use the same settings 360° for 250 seconds and I would just place my easy press right on top and let it do its thing since my heat press is already hot I'm going to use my press but the easy press will work great with no additional pressure so in my heat press again transfers on the bottom then my ornament and then my butcher paper around both sides I'm just going to slide it in and press this for the 250 seconds okay so the single-sided ornament just came out of the heat press and while the ink didn't completely lift out of the other side as badly as it did the first time you can see that since I used tape the tape marks took off a little bit of the ink where the tape was it lifted the ink a lot worse than where the tape wasn't so theoretically if you wanted to do a double-sided ornament and you did not tape it you may only lift a little bit of the ink out so I still think doing both both sides at the same time is probably your best bet but theoretically you could do it so long as you don't tape but not taping is very risky so on the other side now you can see that this was pressed face down and the transfer quality is so good it's so clear everything is perfectly pressed and transferred so I definitely recommend if you're doing a single sided ornament to press in that order so let me show it to you one more time just so we're all on the same page so if you're pressing just one side of your ornament you'll want to place your butcher paper then your transfer the ornament close it into your butcher paper sandwich and then press from the top and the entire ceramic will heat up and still have enough heat to transfer I feel like it just gives a much better transfer and everything is super clear and crisp so I definitely recommend the transfer on the bottom if you're just doing one side so there's our two final ornaments I feel like the time and the temperature settings work great so you'll want to press for 360° for about 250 seconds it is a lot of pressing time but I think the transfer results are worth it if you have any questions about sublimation or this process or if you want to buy anything that you saw in today's video I will link everything in the video description for you so you can always find those links in the video description and if you have questions you can always leave those in the comments if you found this video helpful make sure to like it and consider subscribing to my channel for more craft howto videos thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next [Music] video

Channel: Karley Hall

Views: 10,806

Keywords: sublimate on ceramic, sublimation tutorial, sublimation printing, heat press, how to sublimate, sublimation for beginners, sublimation tutorial for beginners, christmas ornaments, christmas sublimation project, ceramic sublimation ornaments, sublimation with easy press, sublimation ornaments, sublimation tutorial how to make your colors pop, sublimation tutorial videos, how to sublimate on ceramic ornaments, how to sublimate both sides of ornament, sublimate on ceramic tile

Id: 9Dtzv12nS-M

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023