Heat Transfer Vinyl and Rhinestone T-Shirt (Part 1)

I bought this plain t-shirt last year thinking that it would be good to use for heat transfer vinyl (HTV).  I had lots of different ideas swirling around in my head, and that is where they stayed, because life got busy.  So today I decided to 'bite the bullet' and finally do the project.

I started with just a plain long sleeved t-shirt, and picked out a design from my Silhouette studio.  I started out by cutting my design out on plain paper and laying it on the shirt to see how it would look.

Originally I had made the design 12" x 12", then I discovered that my vinyl was 12" x 9" so I had to make a few adjustments to the size.  Here is the original design, it's called floral filigree.

Because I knew that I wanted to put rhinestones in the centre of the flower, I had to adjust the design to make the centre a blank space.  I had to take each of the shapes from the middle and delete them ( you need to ungroup them first.)

When I had gotten rid of all the little shapes, I took the 'draw freehand' pencil and drew a shape which would be cut out from the centre.

When I was happy with my freehand shape I grouped it with the rest of them image.  This is important to remember as some images need to be flipped before cutting them in vinyl (letters are a good example of this.)

Next I moved on to cutting my image out of the HTV.  I got my HTV from Craft Vinyl - the prices here are great and Nick is very efficient with fulfilling the orders and shipping.

HTV needs to be cut with the DULL SIDE FACING UP and the SHINY SIDE FACING UP (the exact opposite of how you cut regular vinyl.)  Here are the settings which I used on my Cameo.

Once the HTV was cut I started to 'weed' - that is, peel away all the unwanted parts of the image, leaving the main image attached to the backing (this backing acts as transfer tape.)  Here is the partially 'weeded' image.

Now for the fun part - applying the image to the shirt.  First I ironed my shirt, just to make sure I'd removed any moisture.  Next I laid the image where I wanted it on the shirt, covered it with a Teflon sheet and began ironing.  The HTV comes with full instructions for applying, but basically the iron needs to be 280-300F, press the iron down on the Teflon sheet moving it back and forth, not staying in anyone place for more than a few seconds.  This HTV is 'cold peel' which means that it needs to cool down for 30 - 45 seconds before trying to peel off the backing.  Here is the image applied.

Tomorrow I will post pictures of the finished shirt with instructions for adding rhinestones.

Thanks for stopping by.

Michelle