The Oily Krafter Dollar Tree Mug Sublimation

hello everyone judy madore here with the oily crafter my husband greg behind the camera today we're going to try to sublimate on a dollar tree mug this one here we've figured out is a 15 ounce mug so over on the heat press we have that heating up already for our mug press that we have we got it going at 400 degrees and we've got the time set for two minutes and 40 seconds so one of the things that we're going to do with the mug itself you don't want to use rubbing alcohol because i've found out that it makes it hard for the laminate to stick that we're going to be using and so i'm using a microfiber cloth i'm just going to wipe off the fingerprints because i've been messing with it and i'm going to set it upside down when i get done because when we're getting everything lined up we're going to want to line it up with the bottom here because we do have this lip i've measured it this particular one is about four and a quarter inches below the lip so i made my laminate about a little over four inches because i know i'm not going to go all the way to the bottom but i'm going to go close to it then i measure it around this particular mug has about 10 inches so i'm pre-cut my laminate which i'm using the the matte this is the standard matte laminating film three mil this is the 12 inch by 250 inch roll it's one inch poly clear core so if you're wanting to order these and so these are uh the matte finish like i said they're three meal so i cut it down and you're or who you ordered those from southwest mining so i recall they did an outstanding job of getting it to us in a very short yeah very short period of time and uh we ordered two rolls of the 12 inch and then two rolls of the 18 inch so we have two different sizes but uh so i got it cut down to what i believe will fit the mug and to make it easier to get the mug in and out plus it also helps protect the uh the mud press itself i did some butcher paper i do that to help keep any extra moisture out of it that's going to wrap around it's going to make it easier for me to grab hold of it and pull it back out when it's done so what you're going to need as well also is you're going to need some heat tape heat resistant tape to hold it down to the mug while you're getting it ready to put into the heat press and of course and then when you're cutting it down whatever supplies that you need to do cutting like your i use a rotary color this is a metal metal uh ruler and that's and then like i said microfiber those are pretty much all the uh supplies that i feel that you need and we'll go over this a little bit more as we actually start putting it together [Music] all right this is greg madore with the oily crafter so we are on the computer now and we are ready to pick our image so we've we've gone out and the internet and we found an image that we're going to use now please keep in mind that just because you find an image on the internet does not mean that you can use that image free of charge and then sell it to other people and make money off of it you have to make sure that you have the proper uh authority and the proper approvals to be able to use images and then sell them for profit so it's called a commercial license so today we decided we're gonna we're gonna pick this image and here we're just to accept the defaults notice it's going to bring that image in here so we've got that image now it's in inkscape now one of the things i want to point out is this this image came in and it's 8.3 inches by 5.479 inches tall um what was the height of the image that we could have on this particular mug about 4 inches so about four inches so if we click this button right here if i lock this then when i change the height it will maintain the proportions so now we're at four inches high by 6.068 inches [Music] in in width so on us that's probably about the right yeah because we don't want it more than like 7.25 i think to wrap around the mug yeah exactly so what i'm going to do is at this point is i'm just going to kind of center this you notice my ruler here is set to pixels um we had a little problem with the other computer that we have normally set up for inkscape but being able to do desktop recordings so we had to shift another computer so i apologize if you look at these scales and you see that you're a little confused but just right here again pay attention you can change on the image i have selected you can change whether you're working in millimeters inches uh pixels etc so this particular case we are changed to again we have our image selected it is four inches and it's four inches by six point zero six eight inches and we want to go into file proper document properties style document properties and check which paper we have chosen we want to make sure it's the letter eight and a half by eleven yeah let's see here so us letter and we've got it set on landscape so there you go that's what we're wanting all right and here you can see 11 by eight and a half and it's in inches and it's in inches [Music] so we can zoom out or you can see the whole page if you want i can't remember where the zoom is i think you hold down the control and use your uh wheel view zoom out so you can actually see the paper yeah and in the document properties if you don't want to see that paper you can turn that off this helps you ensure that when you send it to the printer it's within the printing zone uh otherwise you won't get the full picture we found that out through when we were doing another video so bottom line is what i'm going to do is i'm i'm just allowing for a little bit of we just got the one picture today uh that we're going to do so i'm just going to offset that just a little bit here now one of the things i do want to point out when you go to print this out you either have to do one or two things you either have to mirror this image or you have to have the printer set to mirror the image you can go into printer settings there i think somewhere yeah and so right here what we're going to do is we're going to go into file print [Music] now by default i need to pick the printer that we have set up for our for our printing is sublimation is a epson workforce 7720 i go to preferences you notice here i have one and i've already gone through and custom set all of these settings here for cosmos sublimation again we're using cosmos ink we've had really good success with it notice we have paper cassette one paper cassette one lets you pick a number of different paper types gives us more choices it gives you a lot more choices if you use paper cassette 2 you won't have those choices right so again quality under more settings you want to make sure you're set to quality right here um under settings there wasn't anything there under settings i'm going to come over here to more options notice here on on document size we've got eight and a half by eleven same as document size color correction needs to be set to custom advanced make sure you're on icm down here under image options you're going to make sure that you have edge smoothing turned on next thing make sure high speed is normally turned on in this case you do not want it turned on you want mirror image set right so we've got all of those printing preferences selected and right here if i go ahead and send this do we have special paper in there okay so i do not want to send this to the printer so we're going to go over to the printer and we are going to make sure that we have the a sub paper loaded [Music] alrighty so when we're over here at the printer i have an epson workforce 7720 we're going to perform perform a maintenance head check because we don't run our printer every day and it'll help make sure that all the lines are going to be full and when the ink flows when we actually print out the picture it will be a good quality picture so what we do we go into settings go into maintenance and do print head nozzle check online it's the very first one i'm going to pull my paper tray out so when the paper comes out it won't fall on the floor so here's what we mean by test pattern if you will as you can see the one on the left it actually looks pretty good right down there on the very bottom of the black line trying to get the camera to focus maybe too close um there's some fuzziness there a little bit of broken line the one here on the on the right the second one it's it's much cleaner so we decided and you may have to repeat this step a few times um in order to get good clean uh completely filled lines what you don't want is a lot of broken segments broken segments means bad print on your picture which means bad or incomplete mug all righty so we're back at the printer now the epson workforce 7720 we're going to use a sub paper we've had very good luck with this with the cosmo ink um on this printer the 125 gram has really been recommended for the workforce 7720 so that's what we're going to use we're going to put it in the top tray and when we put it in the top tray you're going to notice that asap has printing on the back i don't know if you can see that through the glare or not and when you see that printing on the back with this particular printer i don't know about all the other printers because this is the one we work with we want to see and be able to read that a sub okay so when you put it in there you'd be able to read that it's going to be upside like that okay hang on hang on hang on pull that plain paper out of there okay yeah we did have problems with that last time didn't we and we ended up printing twice because we left plain paper in there do we want to put a couple of sheets of the a7 there you can put a couple of sheets of a sub in there if you'd like yeah but i do not want anything but a sub printer paper in there yeah because a lot of this is unique because last time if you recall what happened just put two in there i do not want several last time what happened was we had a single sheet only in the printer and it would not pick the paper up all right there we go all right so now we have the paper loaded hang on it's eight and a half by eleven high quality plain paper whoops our favorite paper settings so we just that's what we have in there eight and a half level the high quality uh plain paper is what we want so we can just sit okay okay so we have our paper loaded in the printer now and the only thing left for us to do is to hit print [Music] so we'll we will show you the result of that uh printout when when we get it off the printer go already that even though we didn't put it on a high speed it still prints pretty quickly relatively quickly for a picture here we go and this is the way it looks on the sublimation paper okay so next step will be to trim it down so that we can apply it to the mug yep all right so one of the things that we should have done earlier and we're going to have to let you guys know when we put this on after it's been through the heat press we need to let the mud cool so i'm going to go ahead and get this lined up and taped on put it in the heat press and we're going to try 400 degrees for 240 seconds and see how the actual laminate looks on the cup and then we're going to come back cut this down after the cup has cooled wrap it around and then put it back in the heat press and and keep in mind the reason we're doing this is rather than buying the expensive mugs that already have the sublimation on them we went to dollar tree and we bought a dollar mug and then we already had the laminate so we're we're trying laminate on a mug that we paid a dollar plus tax for and so we're going to try that um just because quite frankly we've ordered some mugs that had sublimation um you know built into the surface of the mug and the coating on it and we had some problems with a lot of breakage and so we're trying this just to see just as an experiment see what happens so we will uh let you know go alrighty so i've got the laminate on there it's kind of hard to see i try to keep it close to this bottom edge here got it taped on i'm going to wrap it in the butcher paper and that's really important when you get to the picture i'm going to hold on to the handle the best i can set it in the mug press then i'm going to try to get it all alright so now here we go time started counting down 160 seconds two two minutes and 40 seconds alrighty so we're down to about 30 seconds here one of the things i want you to notice we try to keep our handle as close to center as we can so we can maximize the space for the image because whatever is not inside this kind of brownish red will not adhere to the cup so i'm probably going to have since i took the laminate all the way to the handle it's probably going to have something i'm going to have to trim off with an x-acto knife but you can measure what with if you have a heat press you can measure this around that when it's cool and i'm going to need my glove here when i go to take this out and i said i'll need probably have to trim up that um bill all right let me put my glove on here all right so now i'm going to bring this over here and set it down take the paper off and bring it closer to where you can see okay you can tell i had the laminate much bigger than my press area you can see where the wrinkles are i will have to trim that down with an x-acto knife after it cools a little bit because i don't want to mess with it why it's still hot yeah i'm not sure how well we're focusing on the from that alrighty so i've got my image here while i'm waiting for the cup to cool down i'm going to cut it down to uh right next to the edge seeing how we've got uh that we put it at four inches and uh the mug itself under that lip is four and a quarter so i want it really close on both sides so that's what i'm doing here i'm getting it but you want to leave your length unless you're just wanting to tape it that's one of the things that we could have done a little different uh looking back at it we could have centered the image that way we'd had equal part to go around no big deal just put the tape on there and you'd be good so here we go for the other side make sure i'm on my mat and we'll oops and i was a little my edge wanted to move because i didn't have the paper under it totally i guess i'll kind of this way so i'll have better leverage on the edge there one of the things too if you're like me you have sweaty hands i keep a paper towel close by so i'm not really too sure how much sweaty hands will affect the paper like if you're doing a bigger deal and you end up touching where the actual ink is not sure so we're going to kind of center this probably i don't know if i want to put it on one side of the mug or the other or try to put it in the center because of the length of it so how long was it again about six right at six inches yeah so the longest you want to make it at least for our mug press is 7.5 i misspoke earlier i said 7.25 according to my notes uh we got 7.5 that we can work with with an image this particular mug the height of your mug will tell you what your height is and whether or not you have one that's rounded on the bottom you don't unless you're real special and you know how to do that rounding i try to say the flat surface the best i can and and regarding the the length of the image here's why it's important is we tried one very early on an eight inch length that eight inch length what happened was is out on the edges it was too it was too long for the press so that part of the image didn't heat up if it doesn't heat up as a result of being in the press it's not going to transfer onto the onto the cup itself so you're going to leave you'd be left with no image or a partial image where where it's not fully heated so that's why that's important alrighty so the cup is cool enough now i can put my hand in it and i wasn't sure whether you guys could see or not where it's loose here where it didn't get heat now there is another technique that i don't have the equipment for where you can just use a toaster oven and what they call shrink wrap and you can actually put your sublimation stuff on there shrink wrap it and then heat it i haven't tried that it's going to be interesting to see once i get around to buying the equipment and trying some shrink wrap on that now we also got to discussing because of the way we did the picture how are we going to place it on the mug had this been a longer image you would just take it and you would wrap it around the mug since it's shorter we and i want it i decided i want it more that way i'm going to trim this paper down a little bit also if you're just doing a single image where it's only going to cover one side or the other think about who you're giving it to do they drink with their left hand or do they dink with the right hand or do you double the image and you put the same image on both sides which we did within the other cup that we did but so that's one thing but if you're just wanting to do one side think about what hand do you drink with do you want to see the image or do you want other people to see the image that's that's all what things people consider when they're making mugs so i'm gonna go ahead and get this cut down so i can get it uh taped to the mug that's one another thing that when you decide on your size you're gonna have to uh make sure how it wraps around your mug or goes on one side or the other so i went ahead and left my extra space here for tape because i don't have a whole lot for tape on this side so and i'm going to place this upside down then i'm going to make sure my right now my image is right side up so i'm going to flip it where it's upside down and towards me because you want it going towards the cup and then i want to try to keep it close to the top where i put my sublimation paper my laminate paper at and again you want to make sure the cup is absolutely cool before you start doing this if the cup is warm at all then it may start trying to transfer the sublimation um ink to the mug before you're ready yeah because no i'm just making sure i got it where i want it okay so because the ink itself is heat activated that's why we put it in a heat press okay so i got that side taped and i'm taping this side i'm going to try to make sure i give myself some space there on that where that don't want to cover much of that image okay so i got it taped on there i'm going to take it back over to the uh heat press wrap it in that butcher paper again to help protect the heat press from the ink because the ink sometimes bleeds out through this paper and we'll see in a minute okay so we're going to leave it at the 400 degrees for 160 seconds or the 2 minutes 40 seconds um we haven't done this this is our first time run through we have done no testing so it's going to be interesting to see how this comes out um when we get done after it cools and i trim off this extra it's going to be interesting to see because uh people have asked me about does does the laminate peel off we don't know we haven't done this before so this is all a test on film let me get this centered all right so here we go again i'm gonna get in there best i can and having the paper really makes it easier to uh help line up that handle a little bit and i'm trying to make sure my lip is outside the mug thing a little bit here got it too far that way because the lip itself may keep some of the pressure from going straight onto the image itself all right so now we just got to wait for the time to go count down we're rolling all right so we're down to five seconds getting ready to pull it out it's gonna be interesting to see uh how this all turns out here we go i'm gonna go ahead and turn this off because i know i'm not gonna use it again here okay all right i'm gonna let it sit for a minute here when i grab my weeding tool it's good for helping pull tape off okay seeing the image a little bit through there this is going to be interesting because we've never done this before get that tape started all right yep it's peeling off the laminate so we have to let it let it sit for a little while longer till it cools otherwise i'm going to pull the whole thing off so there you go this method may not work so we'll see here in a few minutes after we've let it sit for a little while longer and cooled alrighty so we've let it cool for a little while and we're going to try to take the uh tape off again i got an x-acto knife here to help me kind of loosen that tape up and cut it right along the edge of my photo just so i try to keep from pulling anything off and i'm so afraid i'm going to cut through everything having a hard time with this so i'm just going to go back to this and see what happens so kind of see what i can do about pulling it loose and get rid of the tape this way okay now what we wanted to know is did it transfer and that's what we're fixing to find out i think it came across pretty good i still have a little bit of color up here at the top where because of the lip thing here but i mentioned that as i was putting it in there i was afraid the lip was going to cause issues with that pulling the tape off the other side that would be based on style of mug you have the lip or not yeah and uh so but as far as the color came out i think it came out really good yeah it does look like the colors came out really well the other thing that we have found with regard to sublimating on mugs ceramics is is it's not just what it looks like as soon as you take it out of the heat press and let it cool a little bit it's let it sit for a while because uh we did another mug for a friend that it the colors look kind of dull when we pulled it out and pulled the pulled the a sub paper off of there and we let it set we let it sit overnight and took it the next day to his uh give it to him as his birthday gift and when he opened it up the colors were very vibrant colors so the purples turned more bright and stuff but we were like really surprised so we didn't know if that was something we did or what so um i still have the tape on the uh the stuff over here i knew i was going to have to trim it down but you can see yeah let me see just trying to figure out if we can get you to see kind of like right in here where it started peeling off because of the tape not really sure you can get it there you go now you can see it perfect perfect yeah it started peeling off because i'm pulling the tape off and i still have to trim this up here but um what we've decided was seeing this that you're going to have to have um [Music] if you do this it's going to be for decorative only you're going to take your little foam dill and make you a flower pot out of it what if you put what if you put mod podge over the top of it dishwasher safe mod podge that is if you get a clean clean deal off i would say yeah you could the dishwasher safe modified might keep it on there um but like i mean you can't really see it on the camera but there's a lot of bubbles and stuff where it started pulling up because i started pulling it off too soon but it was still hot there we go there's a lot of bubbles in there you see a lot of bubbles in there so when i was pulling the tape off yeah but as far as the color and the picture fantastic yeah it and i got it to wrap around pretty good yeah and uh but there again um i don't think this is going to be good for long-term use or for actual drinking out of because if you put hot liquid down in here it may cause the um laminate to come loose so i was going to show you this is one of the breakage mugs that we got had from our the order of sublimation bugs that we actually ordered this is another 15 ounce mug it doesn't have a lip and you can see where we have one picture on this side nothing in the center and then one picture on the other if it still had the handle you could drink it with either side with this particular picture the way we did it or you can make it wrap around like this one here and you can make it bigger we just because we didn't want to distort the picture we made it uh we just it didn't you know we've got a couple inches here on each side so but as far as the transferring of the color of the actual image to the laminate it did great i just don't think for drinking purposes that this is a good method to use on the dollar tree uh mugs but it'd be good for making for like say putting a pencil pencils or if you're like me you have a lot of craft supplies in there well you you might might we might be able to try uh putting to some mod podge over there yeah and then you might be able to do a hand washing a gentle hand washing i doubt seriously that it would ever be dishwasher safe yeah no i don't think so either with mod podge because with the heat covering on there with the heat and stuff i think the laminate may come back off to where it's like when we did the wood and the ceramic tile that's not something that's going to be reheated it's all decorative yeah so i don't think this for usage and um i made the i didn't get my picture quite all the way on the laminate there's some down here that doesn't have picture on it and there's some up here that's uh not on laminate which is interesting but yeah that that peels right off with my thumbnail so that's uh that's not permanent either so there you go there's our recommendations with doing a dollar tree mug laminating with the lamination sheet the as far as the color like i said it did good and but i don't think it's good for actually a drinking mug when you're done be sure to to uh hit the subscribe button and ring that little bell for us and i want to thank you for watching and giving us your time today and i hope you enjoyed the video

Channel: The Oily Krafter

Views: 29,779

Keywords: Sublimation, Dollar Tree, DIY, Coffee Mug, crafting, Epson, Laminate

Id: 2Jpw9NUgXx8

Length: 31min 24sec (1884 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020