The 5 Best Heat Transfer Vinyl | Plus DIY Tutorial
In this post, we ranked the five best-selling Heat transfer vinyl (HTV) you can buy online.
This specialty crafts material can help you to create your own range of products and merchandise, or allow you to adorn t-shirts or other wearables with your designs.
Design Hill says that by creating these sorts of products for your customers and fans, you can open whole new worlds to your brand, and can invent new ways in terms of how you market and promote your style and designs (Source).
Heat vinyl transfer is a very inexpensive way of creating brand new products that are tailored specifically towards your very own market and can give you a way to customize ordinary products and make them yours.
Contents
Comparing The Options
- EASY to USE & CUT & TRANSFER ：Our heat transfer vinyl is thick and smooth with a good cutting application characteristics, which is weed easily through the designs just right.The heat press vinyl sheet also is pressure and temperature sensitive and is easier to take off once the design has been transferred to the desired surface.Seamlessly integrates with Silhouette, Cameo machines.
- ✂ EASY TO CUT & WEED & TRANSFER ✂ Our premium quality heat transfer vinyl will save your time which you may waste on each image or letter, because you can cut and weed easily through the designs just right.The iron on vinyl is sensitive to temperature and pressure, which can be heat transferred on any t-shirt easily.
- 【 EASY TO CUT & WEED & TRANSFER 】Our black heat transfer vinyl will save your time which you may waste on each image or letter, because you can cut and weed easily through the designs just right.The iron on vinyl black is sensitive to temperature and pressure, which can be heat transferred on any t-shirt easily.
- 【GREAT FOR CUTTING & WEEDING & TRANSFER】This htv heat transfer vinyl bundle is made of SGS certified high-quality material, the right thickness and smoothness make it perform well in cutting and weeding. Also, our htv vinyl is temperature and pressure sensitive and can be easily heat transferred onto the desired surface.
- 【EASY TO CUT & WEED & TRANSFER】The PU HTV heat transfer vinyl bundle is thin and smooth with a good cutting application characteristics, so you can cut and weed easily through the designs just right.The PU iron on vinyl is sensitive to temperature and pressure, which can be heat transferred on any t-shirt easily. HTV vinyl is COLD peel.
Vinyl Tutorial Using Heat Transfer Vinyl
The Daily Crafts Vinyl YouTube channel demonstrates how to use heat transfer vinyl. It’ll cover everything from cutting to its final application.
It’s great if you’re just getting started on with your first heat transfer project, or you just need a refresher course if it’s been a while since you worked with heat transfer vinyl.
Indeed, there are many tutorials on the internet that can help you to create the perfect product. The Silhouette School Blog provides a very in-depth and thorough step by step tutorial that covers everything from designing your pattern to the transfer process.
What is heat transfer vinyl?
Heat transfer vinyl is a special type of vinyl that is suited for use with fabrics. Supplied as a roll with adhesive backing, you can cut it into any shape you desire, place it onto a t-shirt, bag or sweater and then transfer the shape over using the application of heat (Source).
There’s no limit to what you can use heat transfer vinyl with, as long as it can take the heat and pressure of the transfer process. The best kinds of materials are cotton and cotton, polyester, and cotton/polyester blends, as well as canvas and often leather. However, it can’t be used with plastics or paper items.
In order to use heat vinyl transfer, you first must make your design. The more complicated the design, the harder it will be to produce, so it’s best to start small. You can create your design either by hand or by using design software, depending on your level of skill.
Once complete, you can use a kit to cut the design from the vinyl, and weed out the inside sections that you don’t want to transfer. Finally, a heat press is used to press the design onto the fabric.
Buying guide
When buying heat transfer vinyl for the first time, there are many important factors to consider.
- Quality: The main and most important consideration is the quality of the vinyl. No matter how good your design is, if the vinyl is of a lesser quality, then you will end up with a low quality end product. Milan Clothing states that high-quality heat transfer vinyl will last a lifetime.
- Cracking & Peeling: Ensure that the heat transfer vinyl that you choose doesn’t crack or peel in the wash.
- Thin Enough? Also make sure that it is thin enough to cut by hand or machine as this will affect the ease of transfer.
- Size: Vinyl size is also another important factor to consider. You will want to change the size depending on the items that you’re going to transfer the designs onto. If you are working with t-shirts or bags, you will require a size that is big enough to encompass the design for transfer, otherwise you’ll end up with a t-shirt with too much negative space. If you are customizing hats, you can work with much smaller vinyl sheets.
Using Sheets
While heat transfer vinyl is often supplied in rolls, it can make sense to purchase the vinyl in sheets so that you can spend like time cutting off sizes that you need. A pack of sheets is perfect for people who want to make designs of a particular shape, and you will find that these sheets can be fed into a printer more easily than a cut from a roll. The additional benefit is that you can often purchase packs of sheets that come in many different colors, offering you a variety of options when it comes to your work.
Siser Vinyl
One of the big brands in the space is Siser.
Siser produces HTV materials for you to cut with a computerized cutter and heat apply to different soft goods. And they’re excellent at it, they cheekily claim.
They should be, they say, because they’ve been producing heat transfer vinyl (HTV for you beginners) in Italy for more than 4 decades.
That’s quite a long time. In that time, they’ve observed decoration trends come and go- including: puff, matte, huge logos, glossy, small logos, chrome, glitter and all things in between.
Regardless of what, their materials are what endure.
They also say that their employees are an enthusiastic group. You can observe it in their videos, on their faces at industry events, in their voices on the telephone or while you’re reading about it on the Siser blog.
They consider themselves makers, designers, doers, creators, educator- using their materials day in and day out, creating, cutting samples and continually pushing boundaries.
They work tirelessly, they say, but they don’t take themselves too seriously.
On Mugs
You can transfer designs onto porcelain mugs in order to personalize your morning coffee experience. Rather than use an iron or a press to do this, what you need is a heat gun. Or you can use a heat press machine.
How to HTV a Mug (without a mug press) | DIY Valentine’s Day Mug | Craft Fail | Dollar Tree Crafts
These allow you to direct the heat to a particularly small region so that you can tackle smaller, curved areas. Be aware that you may need to smooth the pattern over a curved surface in order for it to sit perfectly flat.
A Heat Transfer Vinyl Printer?
There are many vinyl cutting kits available from your local craft stores or online that will allow you to cut out your desired image from the vinyl, as well as removing the negative inside space, such as the space in letters.
The Silhouette Portrait 2 Starter Bundle
While not quite a heat transfer vinyl printer, it’s more of a cutter that can register and cut printed materials.
According to their marketing materials, it can cut vinyl, heat transfer material, cardstock, photo paper, copy paper, rhinestone template material, fabric, and more
However, if you are branding products as part of a startup commercial business, then you may want to invest in a printer that will print and cut the designs for you in one go. This will help you to save time which ultimately means you’ll make more money!
Wholesale Options?
When you’re first starting out you might only have one color of vinyl to work with, as the costs can be prohibitive if you want to be single rolls of any color. Rather than buy one by one, it might make more sense to start purchasing your rolls in packs, or even wholesale. This will allow you to have many colors at your disposal so you can get your creative juices flowing.
Heat Transfer Vinyl & Cricut
Cricut is a machine that can automate many of the heat transfer vinyl steps for you.
You can choose from many designs online, in the SVG format, and load it into the Cricut software. Once you have your design perfected, you feed your vinyl transfer sheet into the machine, press start, and watch as the machine automatically cuts your vinyl for you.
A Cricut How To
The only thing you need to do is weed the inside negative spaces and then you can iron on your transfer to your target item.
Etsy Options
We took a deep dive into Etsy and found some pretty interesting options- head over to Etsy to check them out.
| Some Etsy Options | Etsy Product Rating | # Of Etsy Reviews (View All The Etsy Options Here) |
|---|---|---|
| Siser HTV Vinyl - Princess Bundle Rolls Sheets s Glitter Solids Pinks Purple Rose Gold Iron On Heat Press Transfers Pink | 5 out of 5 stars | (4) |
| V2 Pro 6-Color Bundle Rolls | 12" x 24" Starter Combo Iron On Vinyl Transfer HTV Shirt Press Incl. Teflon Sheet | VViViD | 4.5 out of 5 stars | (184) |
| Red and Black Plaid , Patterned Lumberjack Vinyl Sheets, Printed Oracal Outdoor Vinyl Sheets, HTV vinyl, Adhesive 5068 | 5 out of 5 stars | (320) |
| Red and Black Buffalo Plaid Printed & Vinyl Sheets | 5 out of 5 stars | (297) |
| Siser Easyweed - , 40+ vivid colors available, tshirt vinyl, iron on vinyl, HTV, Cricut Vinyl Free Shipping | 5 out of 5 stars | (405) |
| Red and Black Buffalo Plaid Printed & Vinyl Sheets | 5 out of 5 stars | (297) |
| 18" x 12" Buffalo Plaid Red And Black Patterned HTV Red And Black Plaid, Buffalo Check Tshirt Material | 5 out of 5 stars | (350) |
Rolls
You can buy big, bulk rolls of the stuff if you are a T-shirt entrepreneur looking to make money online with a Shopify store, for example.
The 651Vinyl website has a bunch of rolls you can preview.
Their top-selling brand, apparently, is the EasyWeed cuttable heat transfer vinyl material. They say that it applies at a lower temperature, is able to be peeled cold or hot and does not raise in the course of weeding.
Additionally, it is incredibly long lasting wash after wash and utilizes a reduced pressure setting application.
EasyWeed also is thinner than their rival’s materials while offering a one-second tack application which is ideal for multiple layers. EasyWeed’s pressure-sensitive carrier enables you to provide meticulous patterns on a number of fabric types.
