How to Use Printable Heat Transfer Vinyl with Cricut | Printable HTV Tutorial

hey crafty fam it's alex van over and welcome back to my craft room in this video i'm going to show you how to use printable heat transfer vinyl to make your very own print and cut htv projects in this tutorial i'm going to be using starcraft printable transfers for dark materials so before we hop into the tutorial let's talk a little bit about this product in this tutorial we're going to be using starcraft inkjet printable transfers for dark materials the reason that they're labeled for dark materials is because the background of this printable htv is white so if you have any white areas of your design or any gaps and colors of your design you will see the white backgrounds of this htv but as long as your design is really colorful or it's printing some kind of color over the whole design you can print over top of the whole transfer and nobody will ever know that it's just for darks and because of that you can use the dark transfers for any color of material that you want there is also starcraft inkjet printable transfers for light materials but because that's more limited and the colors you can use it with and it's a little bit harder to apply i prefer using dark materials on any color of garment or project that i have you can tell that this can be used on light colors because on my sweatshirt it's basically just a white and a purple tie dye and it worked perfectly on this sweatshirt so i promise you can use it on any color that you want now if you want to try your own inkjet printable transfers you can find them at 143vinyl.com and you can use my code alex5 to say five percent if you decide to shop at 143 so i'll be sure to leave a link for you guys in the description below okay let's get into this tutorial so before we get into the printable htv project let's talk about some different file types that are going to work well for this material and some that are not so i'm going to show you a couple of examples so this is the bundle i'm going to be using from design bundles as you can see it is a sublimation type file which can work for print then cut but when you're using print then cut htv you'll want to keep a couple of things in mind when choosing your files the best types of files have two different components first of all they have defined edges so even though all of these messy bun different options have like these small pieces of hair kind of sticking out they still have closed edges and they don't have a ton of little pieces the second aspect that these messy buns have that make it good for print then cut is that they also are going to come off the sheet in all one piece so even though i'm gonna have to weed out like this piece between the hair and the sunglasses and things like that this is gonna come off the backing all in one sheet which means that i don't even have to use a heat transfer mask so those are two things that are going to make it a lot easier for me is that this design has defined edges and it's going to come off the backing all in one piece now let me show you an example of a type of file that's not going to work as well for printable htv and that's a design like this and though these are very pretty and i would love to use them having these little pieces that are off here to the side these are gonna turn into a bunch of little tiny cuts and honestly guys they're gonna be a nightmare to cut on printable htv so because these don't have defined edges it's not going to work very well and all of these little offshoots and little pieces are going to make it really really tough to cut on printable htv and get over to your final design so i hope that makes sense and i hope that you choose designs that are going to make your life a little bit easier when it comes to crafting with printable htv so now let's go back in to design space and next we need to go ahead and grab our file that we're going to be using for this project and in fact before we do that let me show you another aspect that's really really important at print and cut that i think a lot of people skip so if you've never done this with your qriket explorer air 2 then before you do any print then cut projects at all i want you to calibrate your machine it's really quick and really easy so let me show you how to do it in your design space canvas you'll go up to this little menu right here which is called the hamburger menu you'll click the hamburger menu and you'll see your profile and then you'll go down to calibration and you'll see that you only have one print then cut type of option and that's right here i'm not going to walk through the whole process with you because i've already done this on my machine but i can show you the beginning part of it and show you how easy it is so when you're ready to calibrate you click the green print and cut button and a page like this will come up the first thing you'll do is you'll print a piece of paper just a regular white printer paper and design space will put its own calibration design on it and then you'll take that piece of paper and place it on a mat just like you normally would and insert it into your machine and then your machine is going to make some cuts and then the design space will ask you which cuts were in the center of the lines and things like that trust me it's super easy and the um the prompts on the screen will walk you through the whole process so it's really quick and easy but it's going to make sure that you don't have any little white edges around the outside of your cuts and so it's going to make your print then cut projects way higher quality so then after you've calibrated your machine then you can go ahead and begin your project first of course by grabbing the file you're going to be using so i'm going to go into my uploads and grab the messy bun file that i've already uploaded and click the green add to canvas button now when it comes into my canvas as you can see it is giving me a yellow triangle here in the layers panel which means something is wrong and my cricut won't be able to cut it and i can tell what that problem is already because of the size of my file whenever you're working with print and cut projects you are limited to a width of 6.75 inches by nine and a quarter inches high so you can't print and cut any larger than 6.75 inches by 9.25 inches so i need to resize my image to make it as big as possible that print then cut will handle but not so big that my machine is going to stop me so with my file selected i'm going to come over to the height and i'm going to start by changing it to 9.25 which is the maximum and then as you can see the design by default is already 6.6 inches wide which is pretty close to the maximum width as well so that's basically as high or as large as i'm going to be able to get this design so that's what i'm going to go ahead and stick with so now that we have it sized we can go ahead and move on to the next step of our project which is clicking the green make it button now we're not going to make any changes over here on the left hand side of the screen because with starcraft or dark materials we are not going to mirror anything or make any changes on this screen at all so that's super easy we're going to click the green button in the lower right hand corner to continue and this will bring us to our materials selection screen and once our machine connects at the top of the screen next we need to go ahead and go through the printing process so i'm going to show you some of the settings that work really well for my printer but you may need to be prepared to do a couple of different prints to get the best quality based on your printer and the best settings that work for you so i'll begin by clicking the green center printer button and you'll see we have a couple of different options one of them is adding a bleed and any time that i am doing a print and cut project unless i have an offset i always add a bleed and a bleed is basically just a little border of ink that goes all the way around your design and what this does is just in case your cricut is a little bit off even after you've calibrated it you won't have any white edges around your design in fact when i unchecked the bleed you should be able to see that the design gets just a little bit thinner overall you guys see that especially if you watch these little edge hairs they do get a little bit thinner and then if i click it to turn the bleed on everything gets a little bit thicker so i always have that on unless i'm using an offset the other thing i like to do is check the use system dialog button because that's going to give me some advanced settings that i can choose for my print to make it a little higher quality so since i've chosen use system dialog i'm actually not going to be clicking print when i click print or it's not going to go straight to my printer so i'll click the green print button and all that's going to do is open up my system dialog box now keep in mind that you may have to go behind a couple of windows so you may have to minimize qriket design space in order to find your system dialog box the first thing i'm going to do is go over and actually select my printer because i don't want to be printing on my st2000 since that is a sublimation printer so i'm going to choose the epson 2760 that is the um new print and cut printer that i've been using lately and i am loving it so i'm going to make sure that the printer i want is selected and then i'm going to choose the preferences button so that i can make some changes to my settings i like to leave my paper type as plain paper but one really important setting that i always choose is under quality i like to choose high quality and that's going to prevent some of like the lines that you'll see between the prints and things like that but like i said you'll want to experiment with the settings that work best for your printer you can also find some more settings under the more options button and you can do things like color correction and turn off high speed and do all kinds of cool things i found for my printer those things aren't necessary but just a little tip in case you want to experiment with getting higher quality settings without buying a new printer so once i have my settings chosen i'm going to click ok and then we need to go over to our printer to actually choose the printer settings and load starcraft printable transfers into our printer once all of the settings are ready on your computer next it's time to set up your printer for print then cut and by the way i did get a new printer for print then cut i'm now using an epson ecotank 2760 for my print and cut projects and i'm really really liking it so definitely check out the 2760 if you're interested in a good printed cut printer but whenever i do a print then cut project i always like to remove all of the plain paper from my printer's paper tray and this is because if i happen to print a second copy by accident or something i don't want to print it on plain paper and waste any ink so i always just take out everything except what i want to print on next you need to load the starcraft transfers for dark materials into your printer and i know this is pretty obvious but i just want to say you also need to make sure that the paper is oriented to print on the correct side with starcraft dark transfers it's super easy because you definitely want to print on the plain side the backside has red writing that says starcraft for dark materials so that makes it super easy to know which side is which so then you just need to insert it into your printer and then most likely your printer will ask you to confirm the settings so i'm going to confirm that i'm using plain paper then once everything is set up on your printer you can just go back to your computer and press the print button and once your image is printed you can move over to your cricut to cut out your image and once your image has been printed next you need to select the correct cut setting for your qriket explorer air 2 to cut out your image i really like to use the paper setting that's on the manual dial on the cricut explore air 2. that's what i have found works best for me but if you happen to be using the qriket maker then i recommend using the rice paper setting so once you have your dial set to paper now we can hop back over to our qriket machine and finally cut out this image once your cricut explore air 2 is set to the paper setting now it's time to load our image onto our mat and into our machine so that we can watch it cut i'm going to be using the light blue light grip mat for my starcraft printable transfers but you can also use the green standard grip mat if you prefer so i'll begin by removing my clear cover sheet from the top of my mac to make sure that it's nice and sticky then i'll take my transfer and i'll put it in the upper left hand corner of the mat but i like to get it as neat and straight along these edges as i can i just think that makes it a little bit easier for our machines to do a really nice print then cut and once it's lined up make sure that you run your hand over top of it and push it down so it's stuck really well to the mat then next we can open up our explore air ii insert the mat underneath the white guides and load it into our machine then press the cricut button to begin cutting full once your machine is finished cutting you can unload it and next we need to remove our transfer from our mat and the best way that i found to do this is to flip the mat with the sticky side facing down and then gently remove the transfers from the mat like this then of course i'll stick my clear cover sheet back over top of my mat to keep it sticky for as long as i can and next we'll get to the most important step of the entire process when it comes to starcraft for dark material transfers and next we'll do the most important step of the entire starcraft printable transfer process and that is to lift the edges of the cut before trying to remove it from the backing or place a transfer mask over top of the cut and the reason this is so important is because if you don't lift up the cut lines and you immediately try to add it to a heat transfer mask like this to transfer it over to your garment chances are you're going to rip the paper backing or rip the transfer because the paper is really quite thin so the way that we're going to lift the edges is i have a couple different suggestions for you my favorite tool for doing this is actually the cricut weeding tool because it's not quite as sharp as a pin pen so it can lift the edges a little bit easier and it scratches the ink off a little bit less often because the ink can still be scratched off using a sharp weeding tool but if all you have is a pin pen weeding tool that will work okay as well so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start in a place that has an edge that i can see on my transfer so let's say we'll start right here in the corner of her little hair bow so i'm going to kind of bend back the material and as you can see we use a good cut setting because i can already see a small gap between the backing and the cut and what i'm going to do is i'm going to use my qriket weeding tool and just begin lifting up underneath the transfer super gently and start lifting it up off the edges just like that so then what i'm going to do is i'm going to run my weeding hook around all the edges of the transfer before i move on to any next steps do you guys see how my hook is actually underneath the transfer itself that's what makes it so easy using the cricut weeding hook and this is why i also suggested that you use um designs that have mostly all one piece or you could do a few very large pieces because lifting the edges is going to be much easier on just a couple of pieces versus trying to do a ton of little tiny specs [Music] okay now we'll look and make sure that all the edges are lifting really nicely because once we have run the weeding hook underneath them they should lift pretty easily and so again guys i'll just reiterate it one more time i am begging you not to skip this step with lifting up the edges i know it seems like a waste of time that is the number one mistake that i see when people use these transfers is they don't lift those edges and then they have a lot of problems but once the edges are lifted we now have two different ways that we can proceed through our project because my project is all one piece i can simply peel the entire thing off the backing and then take it over to my garment and just lay it on top i do not need a heat transfer mask in order to do that however if you have several pieces that really do need to stay in place and you want your design to remain intact i am going to show you how to use a heat transfer mask on your design now in case you've never heard of a heat transfer mask before it's essentially like transfer tape that's heat resistant so you can buy plain sheets of this at 143 vinyl as well as your starcraft dark printable transfers um so you can buy plain sheets of this the other thing that you can do if you don't have any transfer mask is you can actually use carrier sheets from previous pieces of htv as long as they're not like glitter htv or something that has a texture um because then it'll get stuck in your actual um press so i don't recommend using like glitter htv sheets but regular htv um carrier sheets can be used for this process as well so now we're basically just going to apply this like we would with regular htv but first i'm going to go ahead and remove the rest of the sheet away from the cut because i don't necessarily want to take this over to my um garment so i'm going to go ahead and remove it you'll just want to watch any of these little pieces make sure you don't take too much with you and then i can also go ahead and remove small pieces in the middle like this oopsie i missed a piece guys this little area right here in the middle i don't think i lifted all those edges [Music] and you guys can see that black border all the way around these edge pieces that's the bleed that cricut design space added to our design just in case my cricut machine was off a little bit with its cut then we had some extra margin to spare [Music] and now that everything else is off of the sheet we can go ahead and trim a piece of heat transfer mask to match the size of our design and then we will apply it [Music] and um transfer masks can be reused so if you hang on to it and you put it back on the backing you can use it for multiple projects so next we'll go ahead and peel the backing off of the transfer mask and apply it just like we would regular transfer tape and the way that i like to do this without getting any bubbles as i like to hold my heat transfer mask with one finger on each side and then i'm actually going to push it down into like a horseshoe shape see how it kind of looks like a horseshoe at the top and when i push it down towards my decal i'm going to stick down that center part first and then i'm going to let down one side and then the other side that just makes it really easy for me to control how i lay it down so that i don't get a bunch of bubbles or wrinkles in my project because unfortunately sometimes these guys can be kind of staticky so sometimes the design will kind of jump up onto the transfer sheet before you're ready what i'll do to correct this is i'll just really gently peel this off of the heat transfer mask notice i haven't squeegeed anything down yet i'm just gonna real gently peel this off here and then it looked like the only area that was struggling was this area around the sunglasses so i'm just going to peel that back and then i'm gently going to lay the transfer mask back down [Music] so once it's laid down very neatly over top of my transfer next i'll use a squeegee to burnish or apply pressure down onto the transfer mask that can also get rid of any last small bubbles or anything like that [Music] and then we'll flip it over and remove the backing from the transfer mask and from the print itself [Music] and once we have the piece all ready we can move over to our heat press to apply our print then cut project so now let's talk about setting up the press for your printable htv i have my starcraft heat press preheated at 350 degrees for 30 seconds with medium pressure and i want to show you what medium pressure looks like on my heat press just to kind of give you an idea because i know when you you are new to a heat press can be a little bit confusing as to what medium pressure really means to me what medium pressure means is that it takes a little bit of muscle to get it closed not too much but just enough to make sure that i'm bearing down nicely on my sweatshirt so i'll show you what medium pressure looks like before we apply the printable transfer so it takes a little bit of pressure from me but like not a ton to get my press closed another important aspect of working with printable htv is to make sure that the press is nice and even so what that means is after i line up my printable transfer on my sweatshirt i'm actually going to take the collar back here and scoot it off the back of my platen so that there's only a flat surface left on my press when i actually press it down this is going to ensure that all of the pressure actually ends up on my transfer and it doesn't end up getting taken away from by that top collar another trick that i'm gonna use when lining up my transfer on my sweatshirt is that i want it to be about three inches below the collar so i like to use three fingers stacked like this to go below the collar on my transfer to make sure that it's lined up exactly where i want it so i'm just gonna put my three fingers underneath the collar and move my transfer down to be below those three fingers the other thing that you'll notice is that i do have a teflon sheet attached to the top of my heat press and i have magnets holding it on if you have a heat press i highly recommend grabbing some teflon and doing the same thing my teflon sheet and my magnets are both from 143 vinyl but this makes it super easy because i never have to remember to add teflon over top of my press it's just always automatically there so now i'm gonna lift up my sweatshirt and make sure everything looks nice and centered and actually i think it may be a little bit tilted so i'm going to adjust it just a little bit [Music] let's try it about like that got at least three fingers up there yes and that's looking much better so now when i place my sweatshirt on my heat press i'm just gonna kind of move it back because remember on a heat press the top part is not the hot part that's just the top so i can touch the bottom without burning my fingers then i don't know how well you can see that on the camera but i actually have the whole collar sticking off the back of the heat press so there's nothing but my sweatshirt and my transfer on the actual bottom of the heat press where all the pressure is going to be so now let's lower our heat press platen and press our project [Music] [Music] and it looks beautiful now because i used a heat transfer mask i have to wait for my project to cool completely before removing the transfer mask if you were one of those people who just peeled your transfer off and put it right on top of your sweatshirt or whatever you're pressing on then you're all good to go but for those of us who use a transfer mask we're gonna let it cool completely before we peel off the transfer mask i'm going to go ahead and turn off my heat press and just give it a few moments to let it cool once your garment is completely cooled to the touch which means when you literally touch on top of it it actually feels cool you can slowly remove your heat transfer mask once the heat transfer mask is removed your project is all finished check out how cute this turned out if you haven't already joined one of my crafty fans on facebook i would love to have you be a part of them so i'll be sure to link all of my groups down in the description below and if you decide to make anything using printable htv and you share it out on instagram i would love it if you would use the hashtag diy alex so that i can see what you guys are crafting and if you made it this far in the video then i really would love to get to know you on social media so please be sure to find me at diy alex van over on pretty much all major social media platforms and i'll be sure to drop direct links to all my profiles down in the description below if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more just like it then be sure to subscribe to the diy alex youtube channel and be sure to ring the bell so that you get notified every single time that i put out a new video every single week but don't wait for next week's video be sure to check out this one next or if you want to make your diy dreams come true be sure to check out this video i know that you're gonna love it

Channel: DIY Alex

Views: 675,869

Keywords: cricut, cricut wedding projects, diy wedding, cricut explore air 2, cricut maker, diy wedding, cricut wedding ideas, crafts, easy cricut craft, diy

Id: WFT1UQL2wf0

Length: 27min 26sec (1646 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022