Hey Crafters!
I am so excited to tell you about my first HTV (heat-transfer Vinyl) layering project, I am very happy with how it turned out. I started out uneducated on how to do multi-layers so I turned to youtube and searched away. However, I was finding little to no consistency between techniques in peoples videos. I looked on cricut.com and found that they had a detailed step-by-step instruction but I didn’t feel that it would be completely “foolproof” and in my case I needed it. One thing I noticed was that some people on youtube were using multi-use paper, which I was going to buy but couldn’t find. Then I realized it was probably similar to parchment paper, so I took a risk and tried it and It worked!
When looking for a pattern I had two things in mind: 1. the pattern must be appropriate 2. It can’t be more than two colours…too much layering! Luckily, I found one in no time. I quickly took to my machine and cut away, unfortunately I was so excited that I forgot to take videos of it cutting the vinyl. Once I had the layers cut I thought it would be smooth sailing but I was worried about having the pattern off-centred. I saw on youtube that you can find the centre of your shirt by folding it vertically and heat pressing it. I don’t think I applied enough pressure though because once the shirt was open it was hard to find the crease.
The stress didn’t stop there. Not only did I have to find the centre of the shirt to place the vinyl but I had to decide what piece of vinyl would be best to place. I decided that I would place my larger piece of vinyl first (orange) because I felt that the black piece’s placement was dependent on where the orange vinyl was placed. I also felt that placing the black one first would be harder to get centred because of its shape. I followed the application recommendations from Cricut about pressing firmly for a few seconds because to avoid overheating the first layer. I had to be especially aware of overheating the base layer because of the size of my EasyPress. In hindsight layering would be less tricky if I had a smaller press that doesn’t engulf my entire pattern.
Heres a picture of my Cricut EasyPress
