Making a vinyl shirt print is fairly straightforward. As you can probably tell, it involves a lot of transfers and a lot of heat. We transfer your design to vinyl and then transfer that vinyl to your shirt using a heat treatment.
The most important step is the first one: vectorizing your design so that it’s ready for cutting. If your design is in a raster format, this is when we convert it to a format that our cutter can read. It’s important to have a good design file so that the cuts are as clean as possible.
We send the design file to our cutting machine, and it begins to cut your design out of sheets of vinyl, one color at a time. The cutter can handle some rather tricky cuts that would be very difficult to do by hand. There is still some handiwork involved, though, as the excess vinyl must be manually removed from the sheet in a process called “weeding.”
After only the vinyl design is left on the sheet, we begin applying it to the garment using a heat treatment. We carefully align each color, recreating the design layer-by-layer. Between each layer, another heat treatment is applied to permanently affix the vinyl to the shirt.
The process is done and ready to wear!