5 More Custom Transfer Layouts and a New Binder Catalog
Jan/120
Which do you like the best? Vote for your favorites on our blog! All 15 of our Great Dane Graphics sneak peeks are shown online and we are looking for your feedback.
New All Sports Layout QAP-46
New Cheerleading Layout QCH-132
New Football Layout QFB-153
New Fire Layout QLW-60
New Music Layout QMU-85
We will screen-print your design, and ship the same day if you order a one color transfer by 11 am EST, and in just 2 days for a multi-color transfer. Once your custom transfer is received it can be applied to your apparel in just seconds with a heat press. There is not an easier way to create custom apparel. You are creating your customer’s apparel without the need for art skills or programs, or expensive and messy screen printing equipment.
Like what you see? These and many others are available in the new personalized binder Idea Book™. The binder catalog gives you a great presentation when you meet with potential customers and is a great companion to the online Easy View™. It is the iron-on industry’s largest, filled with thousands of customizable layouts. The book is color coded in sections including fashion, occasions, school, business and sports. Each section is started with full color photos showing the potential for completed apparel on models. The binder cover is personalized with a one line personalization of your choice giving you a professional sales tool.
Apparel Terms to Help with Heat Transfers
Nov/111
Terms used when ordering apparel can be confusing. A special thank you to team member Andy Curtiss who did some research on what they mean and how it comes into play when applying heat transfers.
Denier– A unit of measurement that indicates how fine the weave of a material. Specifically, denier references to the weight of a fiber. For example, 1 denier = 1 gram per 9,000 meters of a fiber. So this means that the higher the number, the heavier the weight of the fibers used. A lightweight garment has a lower denier. For example, a woman’s nylons could be 7 denier. But a heavy duty nylon awning could be 1,000 denier. This does not affect heat printing.
Moisture Wicking – This term refers to some fabrics abilities to absorb sweat from your skin and pull it through to the outside of the garment. This leaves your skin dry and comfortable and allows the sweat to evaporate more quickly. Both nylon and polyester have the capacity to wick moisture as noted above. This term alone has no effect on the adhesion of our product as it is NOT a special coating, but a natural ability of some fibers.
Dri-Fit, Aerocool and Cool Mesh – These are trademarked or brand terms that refer to a type of jersey in which nylon or polyester has been mixed with cotton or another natural fiber. These garments are advertised as not only good at wicking away sweat, but the added natural fibers like cotton make the garment more breathable and comfortable, allowing a person to cool down more quickly. So when dealing with these garments, we will always need to ask: polyester or nylon.
Porthole, Mini, & Micro Mesh – These are all terms that simply refer to the size of the holes and the denier (weight) of the mesh fabric. All three can either refer to polyester mesh or nylon mesh. The largest holes with the heaviest denier are generally the porthole mesh which is used for some football jerseys or mesh laundry bags. In contrast, the micro mesh has tiny holes and smaller denier and it is used for basketball and lacrosse jerseys. Mini mesh is between the other two and can be used in any of the sports previously mentioned as well as soccer. When a customer mentions any of these products we should immediately ask if it’s nylon or polyester and make the appropriate transfer type choices from there – don’t ever assume!
Tricot Mesh – Tricot is a term that refers to a style of knitting or weaving. The tricot style will generally leave one side of a garment smooth and the other side textured. Tricot mesh is this style of weave used in a mesh jersey. These are often times a higher end jersey in the sports world (it is also used in undergarments and sleeping bags). Tricot mesh comes in both polyester and nylon varieties so we need to ask when customers mention it – don’t assume!
Performance Wear – A garment that is worn close to the skin because of its wicking properties. Performance wear is made to be tight, but flexible so it can be worn under a uniform or as a uniform itself in some sports. Some performance wear is worn as a loose fit. These garments can be decorated with any of our products that are appropriate for polyester. However, other performance wear is referred to as compression fit. These garments are worn skin tight and will generally stretch to some degree. For this fit you should use Elasti Prints® or CAD-PRINTZ™. You will hear the terms moisture wicking, dri-fit and aerocool occasionally in conjunction with performance wear (see above for their definition).
Sublimation – A high end process of decorating garments that involves dying the garment with a gas process. Garments are polyester and start the process as white or very light grey. After the sublimation process is complete, the garment will show a different color(s) on the outside, but still show the original white or light grey on the inside. The only catch to the process is that it easily suffers from dye migration (see below). The only transfer type that can be safely used is CAD-PRINTZ Sub Block.
Sub Block on a Sublimated Shirt
Embroiderer Caters To Conferences With Print-On-Demand Transfers
Oct/110
Conferences are a great niche for custom transfers because they allow you to offer a customized shirt without committing inventory. You may be left with some extra designs, but these can be used for follow-up orders after the event or for next year’s gathering.
By visiting a website like http://www.allconferences.com/, almost any decorator can easily identify if there are any worthwhile conferences near them that would make it feasible to pack up a truck or van with shirts, designs, and a heat press and spend a busy weekend selling logoed merchandise.
For Marjorie Corrow, president, Life’s a Stitch Embroidery, LLC, Niskayuna, N.Y., (http://tinyurl.com/6k6tzsw) custom transfers have been a profitable decorating method to use as she travels to conferences held by Christian youth groups and child abuse prevention organizations. Although Corrow is primarily an embroiderer and brings a few pre-embroidered items with her, the majority of her merchandise is printed onsite.
One lucrative niche that Marjorie Corrow, president, Life’s A Stitch, Niskayuna, N.Y., caters to is conferences. Although she is primarily an embroiderer, she has found that transfers allow her to easily expand her offerings and increase her overall sales.
“I invest in a lot of blanks and about $200 in transfers,” she says, “and I use them for a couple of years. For example, I have two logos I use every year for my Christian youth group.”
One secret to success in catering to conferences is knowing what to bring. Corrow selects a nice variety of apparel appropriate to the event, which typically includes T-shirts, sweat shirts, caps, and women’s tops as well as miscellaneous little things.
“I usually have hoodies and T-shirts with the conference logo on the front chest, down the sleeve, or down the leg. I also bring a selection of blank flannel pants. I typically buy a lot of closeouts that I don’t pay a lot on. I have a good relationship with the wholesaler, and it will let me return closeouts,” Corrow says. “Of course, you have to be at a certain sales volume, and you have to return goods within a certain amount of time. But it allows me to send back apparel that isn’t logoed even though I have to pay the shipping.”
“I have a pretty good feel for how much and what sizes,” the decorator notes. “I only bring things I can sell in subsequent years. That is something that you learn over time.”
Corrow has found that even though she’s often bringing back an old design, she can still sell another piece to last year’s customer by changing the garment it’s applied to.
“For a prevent child abuse conference, I have a design that is hands with spread fingers and thumbs entwined in different colors, sizes, and configurations. They form a U-shaped necklace, and I apply it to the neckline of either a scoop-neck ladies’ shirt or a regular T-shirt.
“This conference is mainly women in helping professions, and the hands symbolize helping. They absolutely love it, and every year I put the hand design on a new piece,” she says.
Each year, Marjorie Corrow exhibits at a Prevent Child Abuse conference where one of her most popular designs is intertwining hands, which she embroiders on women’s wear and bags. She uses transfers for hoodies, flannel pants, and doggie Ts.
Creating Custom Halloween Transfers
Oct/110
In a previous blog we introduced our new Extreme Halloween stock prints and showed you how to customize with name drops. There were five different design choices, all in full color, but sometimes your customer wants something that is all their own, and Easy View™ can help you create a print to meet their needs.
By using the Halloween clip art and your own text, you can customize any of the Easy Prints® layouts.
Don’t limit yourself to just the Holiday section-any of the thousands of professionally created layouts can be customized for Halloween with the use of clip art and your choice of text. In the examples, we used layouts from the Alternative Fashion, Anywear, Basketball and Holiday sections, just using holiday clip art and text to fit the event. Be creative with your text using fun phrases your customer might like.
Is your customer looking for a print for a children’s Halloween party? Order a one color print, press on a white shirt and provide fabric markers to use as the party craft. One customer told me they just provided washable markers and the kids were thrilled that when washed the coloring was removed and they could start all over again!
Transfers Offer Solution For Hard-To-Decorate Items
Sep/110
Almost everyone is familiar with the fact that transfers are a great decorating medium for just about any type of apparel that is made of cotton, polyester, or a cotton/poly blend.
What you may not realize is that Transfer Express offers two distinct types of transfers: screen printed and digital. Screen printed transfers are limited to the traditional cotton and polyester fabrics, but digital transfers such as CAD-PRINTZ™ Opaque will go on almost anything you can fit in a heat press and can be created in unlimited colors.
This opens the doors to a much wider range of apparel and promotional items including nylon team uniforms, umbrellas, swim suits, and leather goods.
When Illinois Glove Co., Northbrook, Ill., was looking for a solution to print full-color logos on gloves for its promotional product customers, CAD-PRINTZ™ turned into a great solution for the company.
Prior to using Transfer Express, the manufacturer was screen printing one-color logos onto gloves. “Screen printing was a mess,” notes Jay Shmikler, director of sales and marketing. “Because the glove was made of a knit fabric, the print would fall into the little mesh holes. We could do only one color with screen printing, and then we lost out on orders to other products that could offer multiple color logos.”
Today, the company uses Easy Prints for one-color orders and CAD PRINTZ for full-color logos. Another reason digital transfers have been such a great match is the wide range of materials that gloves are made of.
“We offer gloves for automotive, construction, farm, ranch, trucking companies, freezer gloves for people who are stocking shelves in the grocery stores, and safety awards; you name it, we have probably done it,” says Shmikler.
So when choosing a decorating process, it’s important to match the right method to the glove material.
“We have certain types of gloves that we use Easy Prints,” says the director. “If the glove stretches, we have to make sure we get Easy Prints because that stretches. If the logo has a lot of detail, we use CAD-PRINTZ. So when someone comes to us with an eight-color logo, CAD-PRINTZ looks amazing. You can get shading that you really can’t get in a screen printed transfer.”
As a steady customer for the past four years, Shmikler has been satisfied with the product and the customer service. “They are good at returning calls, they are professional and they’re easy to deal with.”
If you have a customer come in with a hard-to-decorate item, next time, don’t turn them away. Investigate if using a digital transfer may be the perfect solution!
Switching from direct screen printing to screen printed and digital transfers solved several embellishing challenges for Illinois Glove Co. faced when decorating gloves for promotional product clientele. Photo courtesy of Illinois Glove Co., Northbrook, Ill.
New Halloween Custom Transfers
Sep/110
Ready for your parties and other Halloween events is our newest addition to Transfer Extreme™ – Halloween. Choose from five different colorful plastisol ink transfers or order the multi-pack. Each pack includes 10 transfers for just $20! These custom transfers can be applied to any color apparel that is cotton, polyester or cotton/poly blends in just 4 seconds. They are in stock and ready to ship the same day when ordered by 3:00 PM EST. Add a Halloween transfer to a tote bag for the ultimate Trick or Treat bag, a great favor idea for school Halloween parties!
You can also personalize these stock prints by adding an Express Name or creating a gang sheet in Glow-in-the-Dark for an extra scary touch! Add the name of a haunted house or hay ride and sell for extra profits, or add the host’s name for a great hostess gift for the neighborhood Halloween party.
Halloween Extreme Shirts & More
Screen Printed Transfer Inks: Goof Proof vs Polytrans Plastisol Ink Formulas
Sep/110
White backed in black - Polytrans screen printed transfer
Our Goof Proof® and Polytrans screen printed transfer products use the same ink and paper but offer different application techniques. Both products can be used on cotton, polyester and cotton/polyester blend apparel. Both our numbers and names can be applied using either technique.
Goof Proof® is made for speed! It uses a higher temperature (365º) at a faster application time – just 4 seconds. This is our number one top selling product!
Polytrans uses a lower temperature (340º) for a longer application (10 seconds).
Use Polytrans when:
• A fabric is sensitive to heat such as some polyester
• Doing a multi-color transfer and the background outline color is darker than the foreground color
Using the low temperature technique, the color stays brighter in this situation as shown in the photo.
Custom Transfers with Bling – Metallic, Glitter or Foil?
Aug/110
Is your customer looking to brighten the look of their printed apparel? If so, there are three different custom transfer options available.
The most durable and least expensive is our Goof Proof® in metallic silver ink. Plastisol, screen printed metallic ink transfers do have flecks of metal for some sparkle, but it is the most subtle “bling” of the three. It is the best choice for athletic or school items that need to be durable for constant wear.
The second option is glitter. This has a lot of shine and is probably preferred by females. It is still very durable since it is a screen printed ink. Cheer and dance teams seem to love the glitter as it meets both needs – it adds sparkle and is still durable.
The third option is foil. This is actually a 2 step process as you need both a transfer and the foil product to put over it. This is the look desirable for fashion items and is great because you can choose to foil just a portion of the print giving a 2 texture look at just a 1 color price. However, this is the least durable of the three but by using it with the metallic silver ink, in time if the foil does flake off, you still have a very durable metallic silver print on the shirt.
Metallic ink, glitter ink and heat transfer foil options for when you want to add bling to your screen printed apparel
Tips for Screen Printing Custom Artwork: Tip 4 – Detail Guidelines
Aug/110
Many questions arise when it comes to custom artwork for screen printed transfers and the amount of detail that is able to be printed. The guidelines are different than that of other printed materials such as our digital Cad-Printz™ transfers or other process printed jobs like brochures, business cards or flyers. The biggest difference for screen printed transfers is line thickness and show-thru thickness.
Line Thickness
Line thickness varies depending on which type of ink you would like your transfers printed with:
- Our recommended line thickness for Hot Split, Goof Proof®, Polytrans and Elasti Prints® is .012″ thick for printed areas.
- Our recommended line thickness for Reflective and Glitter is .025″ thick for printed areas.
- Our recommended line thickness for non-Puff colors is .012″ thick for printed areas (This may need increased if printed next to a Puff color. Be aware that Puff ink will increase the printed line thickness. A line that is .023″ will puff up to become .05″ in the applied transfer.)
To test the line thickness in your artwork files, try doing the following:
1. Create a line in your file and make it a different color than your artwork.
2. Set the thickness of the line to .012″.
3. Now move the line around, setting it over top of any artwork that may have thin areas of color. All of your artwork should be at least as thick as that line whether it be text, outlines or objects.
4. Delete the line when you have finished checking your file.
Any portion of artwork that is less than the recommended thickness is not guaranteed to be printed.
Make sure your line thickness meets the minimum requirements for the ink formula you choose.
Show-thru Thickness
Show-thru areas are any area in your design that has no ink but is surrounded by ink. These areas need to be as thick as the following guidelines:
- Our recommended show-thru thickness for all screen printed ink formulas is .04″ thick for show-thru areas except for Puff.
- Puff show-thru thickness should be .1″ thick.
To test the show-thru thickness in your artwork files, try doing the following:
1. Create a line in your file and make it a different color than your artwork.
2. Set the thickness of the line to .045″.
3. Now move the line around, setting it over top of any small non-printing areas. All non-printing reas need to be open at least as wide as that line.
4. Delete the line when you have finished checking your file.
Show-thru thickness is important so the artwork will not close up once it is printed and applied to the garment. This applies to any non-printing area including the open spaces within text.
Make sure your show-thru thickness meets the minimum requirements for the ink formula you choose.
Following these guidelines will help you with the amount of detail you can have in your screen printed designs.
We Can Print Custom Transfers in Any Color!
Aug/110
A customer orders a custom printed shirt but they want the ink color to match an outfit they have—so what do you do?
Answer: No Problem! Our screen printed transfers ink colors can be mixed to match any color you desire.
We stock 63 ink colors (plastisol). But if you don’t see what you need, we can always do a color match to the desired color for a small color match fee. You can either provide us a Pantone® color (Pantone® is a standardized system for colors, often called PMS or Pantone Matching System) or send us an item that you want matched.
Use Transfer Express' Easy Prints® Color Selector to choose ink colors for screen printed transfers.
If you want to see what colors we stock, we offer an approximated online color chart (there is some variance due to the variance in colors on computer monitors), a list of the Pantone corresponding numbers that can be used if you own a Pantone chart, or a color selector specific to Transfer Express can be ordered.
