Can I REALLY Sublimate On Cotton? 💭 The Pros, Cons & Hacks You Need!

it's off bad I call it it turn it off I'm done for a day so just come back if you've ever asked yourself the question can I really Sate on Cotton then you have found yourself in the right place today we're going to go over the pros the cons and the hacks on how you can subate on Cotton in all of the different ways that you can do so if you have already make sure to hit that Thumbs Up Button subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can get notified every time we get crafty now let's go ahead and jump right into it so the question is can I sublate on Cotton technically the answer is still no because you do have to have some type of polymer coating or some type of polymer in what you sulate on so there is not any type of polymers in Cotton because it is a natural fabric however there are lots of workarounds that I'm going to tell you about today the first and most used workaround is using sublimatable HTV now there are a couple different tops that you can choose from the first one that I have here and I'm going to open it up and show you guys this is from HTV rant and this is sublimation HTV and this is a clear HTV so if you are still wanting to sublate on like a white shirt and you do not want to see anything behind it you could use the clear sublimation HTV lay it down on your cotton shirt and then sublimate on top of this this is what it's going to have the polymers in it that's going to allow that sublimation ink to really soak in and that way you are going to get a really really nice print and really nice press if you use this on a white or a light colored shirt the second option that you have for sublating on Cotton is once again still using HTV still HTV rant however this is for dark Fabrics so this is a sublimatable white HTV that you can actually use on darker Fabrics so that is another option now we do go into lots of detail on exactly how to use this type of material to sublimate on cotton and our Maker's going to sublimate coarse which is linked down below for you guys if you want to become sublimation Pros what we do in that course is walk you through the very beginning even helping you choose what printer and ink you want to use all the way through becoming a sublimation Pro without the headache of having to learn all of the different color profiles figuring out how to set up your printer how to print all of those things we cover in our course and trust me when I tell you the price of that course is going to save you hundreds of dollars in wasted blanks I truly mean it so if you're wan to become a sublimation Pro you definitely need to get started with that first link down below with the maker going to sublimate course that we offer another way that you can sublimate on Cotton is using glitter HTV especially white glitter HTV now you can use different colors you don't just have to use white but make sure you stick around to the end of this video and I'm going to show you a little hack on how you you can get perfect prints and perfect cuts on glitter and sublate onto your glitter to apply to your cotton t-shirt now the last way that you can sublimate on Cotton is going to be using the DTF hack and we'll go overhead so you can see this up close now this shirt specifically I made like two years ago and you can see that it is starting to crack a little bit it still feels great it has been washed multiple times so there is a hack with your sublimation printer that you can actually print this and use DTF powder you can print this on DTF film use DTF powder and then press it on your cotton shirt I will link a video down below that will walk you through exactly how to do this but this is the other way that you can sublimate on Cotton now it is a workaround to DTF but it is a great workaround now one one thing I want to make sure we are clear about is the fact that you are still using a sublimation printer so you still do not have white ink meaning you still cannot have a white design and press it on a black shirt even though this is a quote unquote DTF hack it's still not like a true DTF print because true DTF prints have a white ink background round whereas this is not going to because it is coming out of your sublimation printer so make sure you are aware of that blacks are going to be the best for this if you do use lighter colors especially printing on the film sometimes the ink doesn't deposit as well onto that film if it is a lighter color so just know that there are workarounds to use a DTF film and adhesive with your sublimation printer and like I said there is a link down below that will take you to a video to show you exactly how to do this now that we've talked about the different ways that you can sublimate on Cotton let's quickly talk about some of the pros and cons first of all I want to start with the pros the pros with this is you can use your sublimation printer and get great quality images and press them on different materials that may not be polyester I know there are lots of of people out there that don't like the feel of polyester it just doesn't cooperate with them and I completely understand that personally I like the feel of a cotton shirt much better than I like the feel of a polyester shirt so that is a pro is you can still get really nice quality images on Cotton but the biggest con and the biggest drawback for me specifically is the fact that you still have to use some type of HTV and what that does is it makes that design if you are pressing it on the front of a shirt it does still feel pretty thick because you are having to use an HTV so that to me your Pros depending on what type of material you like if you like cotton then that Pro May outweigh the con of it being a thick material on the shirt now the clear I will say does not feel as thick as like the white or the glitter HTV so that is a viable option but once again a con with that is it is clear so you can't do it on dark shirts you still have to sublimate on the clear on white or light Cotton shirts now before I jump into this awesome glitter sublimation HTV hack I do want to touch on sublimation sprays now we have tested a lot of sublimation sprays out there and honestly that to me is just not the move move unless there has been some great breakthrough between now and the time that I have filmed this video there is just nothing out there that we have found that gives great results without making your shirts feel like you have some type of hairspray on them they just get like very stiff we just don't like the sublimation sprays you don't get even results it's just not the move for us so I just wanted to make sure you all are are aware there are sublimation sprays out there that claim you can spray them on cotton and then press your image onto the Cotton shirts like I said un unless there's been some great breakthrough we have not found any that we like at all now let's go ahead and jump into this great hack using glitter HTV and how you can sublate onto the glitter HTV and then apply your glitter HTV to your shirt so we are actually going to start here on the makers going to learn website and I'm going to grab a file that we are going to subate onto a cotton shirt I want to get do this party in the USA shirt so what I'm going to do is I'm going to download that by clicking this arrow pointing down you can see that it comes here in our download so I'm going to double click this to open up this ZIP file make sure that I get that unzipped and now I'm going to pop back over to Cricut design space and you can see that I have uploaded it here in design space as a PNG because we are printing this on our printer we do need to use the PNG version so we just downloaded this as the PNG and now what we are going to do is we are going to size this accordingly so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to size this based on the size uh that I wanted on my shirt I think this right here will be a pretty pretty good size once you have sized it to how large you want it we are going to go to make it so before we go any further you are either right here is where you can go ahead and turn your mirror on we are actually going to be using our Epson surecolor printer which automatically mirrors our image for us so I'm not going to turn the mirror on however if you have a converted Epson ECOT tank or some type of converted printer you do need to make sure that you remember to turn your mirror on at this point or in your printer settings but like I said we're leaving it off because our sure color automatically mirrors it for us so we're going to go to continue I'm going to send this to my printer this is one that I am going to want to turn bleed on and I'll show you why here in a little bit it's just going to leave a lot more room for error for our Cricut to cut cut here later um but I do want to use the system dialogue and I am using the Epson surecolor f170 series we're going to select print it's then going to pop up behind Cricut design space I am going to go ahead and go to color matching turn on my color sync you can see here when we go to print settings that mirror image is automatically on and I'm turning my print quality from normal to fine and now we are going to select print so now that we have this printed you can see where I turned the bleed on this is kind of touching here do not worry not a big deal what I'm going to do now is I'm going to cut my HTV to size so that I'm not wasting all of this extra HTV so I'm just going to cut this down so I can see exactly how big I need to cut a piece of HTV now you do need to keep the registration marks for this hack for right now we are keeping the registration marks and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut this HTV right here and then up the side as well now what I'm going to do is I'm going to press this for just a second and I'm going to add this down here I'm putting my HTV with the transfer sheet side down just to warm it up a little bit and you're going to see exactly why because once I have done that I'm going to bring it back over here and I am going to take the transfer sheet off the front of the glitter HTV and heating it up a little bit just allows this to come off a little bit smoother than if it was completely cold so now I have my glitter HTV off of the transfer sheet I know this SK is going to sound crazy but just hear me out now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a Teflon sheet I'm laying it down on my bottom so I have butcher paper here a Teflon sheet here and the only reason I have butcher paper here is because I did notice I was pressing something the other day and I think there was some ink that got on our bottom half so I want to protect this Teflon sheet up here and make sure that there is no ink transfer so the butcher paper just has a barrier that keeps that ink that might be on my bottom plate there and not on my blank so I'm placing butcher paper a Teflon sheet now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my glitter HTV with adhesive side down on top of the Teflon okay and then I'm going to take my sublimation print face down on top of my glitter HTV now you can tape this down if you want to so I'm just going to quickly tape it down just to make sure there is no ghosting just like that and we are going to press this at 385 for about 40 seconds after the 40 seconds I'm going to bring it over here and show you what it looks like so I'm bringing Teflon sheet and all so now what I'm going to do is I'm taking off the front look how cute and because nothing sticks to Teflon you can see here that we can peel our HTV right off and our adhesive is still on the back like it is still going to press onto cotton no problem so now we have our sublimation design on our glitter HTV you want to make sure that you keep your carrier re your sheet cuz now we're going to add it back to the front and now we can send this whole thing through our [Music] cricket what a tragic way to end a film day that was so hard I could not get it figured out but it's 3 weeks later we have been testing we have been trying we have been researching searching so first off I want to start out by giving Patrick and the team at Caesar North America a shout out they are the ones that initially had this hack that I'm showing you guys how to do um in Patrick's video in they're live it cut Flawless on the Juliet so if you didn't know Caesar has a machine it's the Caesar Juliet it's a die cutting machine and of course because they make make their own HTV they make their own product their machine is going to be optimized to cut their product just like Cricut machines are truly optimized to cut their products so ours did not turn out as well as it did with Patrick and the Caesar team on the Juliet we've also been looking we've seen that people have had comments and questions and things because their cricket was not cutting as as smooth as um it did on their video so through much testing and trial and error I have come up with the way that I think is going to be the best way for Cricut users to do this hack so first thing is the cut settings and we're going to talk about the cut settings here in a little bit I tried it with the carrier sheet put back on the top I tried it with a carrier sheet put back on the bottom I tried it with no carrier sheet I tried it so many different ways um what I found to work the best is cutting it on an extremely new strong GP mat it because it needs to be burnished down so so so so good number two the next thing you really have to take into consideration with your Cricut because the Juliet has a camera that looks and sees this has a sensor and not a camera to see the registration marks so you have to be very precise on how you press your image on the HTV so we're going to go overhead and what I have found to be the easiest to keep it exactly as it should be because once again we have a print and cut image so what Cricut does is Cricut is going to recognize these registration marks which because we are doing it we printed it on a sublimation printer and it mirrored the image it should be over here but what you you need to make sure you do is you line up your HTV with this top Corner because these registration marks and the space between the top here and the sides are insanely important when it comes to using it on with your Cricut so I what I did just to keep it in correct in my mind is I taped this here and here so that we have a straight edge on the top and the bottom so when I go to press it I can just take it off and then lay it straight down on my mat now I'm not going to be pressing this I will tell you what to press it on but just like everything else you do need to use a Teflon sheet to cover the back so what you're going to do is you're going to have a sandwich so remember like I showed you earlier the pressing is going to be the same so what you're going to have is like I said to told you guys earlier nothing on that changes you're going to have your sandwich your Teflon sheet your your glitter HTV your sublimation print and then butcher paper over top of that press at 380 for about 45 to 50 seconds and then this is what it's going to give you now the next thing that I found with the Cricut is that I guess this black maybe it was my printer could have been the little bit of the glitter but it was like throwing my machine off so I highly suggest taking a Sharpie and just very lightly going over those to make it just a little bit darker um to make sure that the sensor on your Cricut picks that up now I also did calibrate my machine to make sure that it was perfectly lined up and now what I want to do is I want to hop over to our share screen and I want to talk about the cut settings that we're going to use so remember I said I tested I tried I did all the things so what I found was that the everyday ironon setting is what worked the best however one pass is not enough and it worked the best for me when it was on three passes well you don't have three passes on the everyday ironon setting you can hit the play button and run it through three times but what I want to show you guys is how you can set up your own material settings for this specific project so if you go to browse all materials and then down here at the bottom left it says material settings click on that you can scroll all the way down to the bottom and you can add a new material now I did say that the everyday ironon was the perfect pressure so if you go to everyday ironon you see that it has a pressure of 113 so that's what we need to set our pressure to this has passes turned off so I will show you how you can change that so we'll go back down to the bottom add a new material you can name your material glitter sublimation from there you're going to change your pressure down to 13 13 which is what everyday ironon is on and then from next step is to take this drop down menu and put 3x that means it's going to have three passes on it and now we can click save so once we're done there we're just going to click off browse all material glitter sublimation is what I saved it under select that done and now what we can do is we can load it into our machine and then just press go and now our machine is going to start registering our registration marks now one thing that I highly suggest you do before you unload your mat is check to see if it cut through and y'all this is beautiful I want you to look look how easy and smooth that cut I mean perfect now all you have to do is take it off of your mat now if you have multiple pieces what you could do is get some HTV transfer tape and try your best to pull them up all together but y'all this is going to give you the results that you are looking for when it comes to getting the edges the color all the way to the edge of your glitter HTV with sublimation y'all I'm obsessed this video has been an actual trial but we made it and we have the perfect results for our Cricut users with this amazing hack from the Caesar team once again shout out to you guys this is an amazing hack we absolutely love it if you have enjoyed this video make sure you hit that that thumbs up subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can be notified every time we get crafty I'll see you guys in the next one