Modesty's Costume Closet

Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV) needs heat to get the glue to fuse with fabric. Loads of official tutorials show how to transfer HTV to fabric using official heat presses. Needless to say, yes, heat presses are ideal for this process. However, this is a budget blog so lets look at best tools.  Tools Last blog, I kept referring to HTV as Iron-on...and that is because I'm using my normal, everyday iron. There are pros and cons to using a household iron for this process:  👍Convenient if you already have one on hand 👍Irons come in many sizes 👎It has limited surface area 👎The hot surface is irregularly shaped 👎HTV does not work with a steam iron 👎The iron needs to be very hot! 👎Cannot be used easily on round/cylinder shaped objects  Using an iron is possible but may not be the best tool in the following cases:  Applying a very large iron on piece Producing a large quantity of products with HTV You plan on selling what you make.  You are applying HTV to a curved object...like a mug, bas

 Die cutter and plotter machines use vector coordinates to plot movement of the blade/pen. That being the case, it works best with simple images, not so much with multi-colored images or images with thin lines. Vector or "stencil style" images and shapes work best for this machine.  For the aprons I had a combination of simple shapes, a stencil, and a mildly complicated solid shape. These images included:  3 circles for gold buttons 2 silver bars  Kanji symbol in silver Flame Hilt in gold and red Stencil Kyojuro in black Dimensions For this project, dimensions of the image were extremely important. The pieces that would have iron-ons included the heart shaped pocket and the heart shaped bib. Using the paper pattern I blocked out where the image would sit.  The pocket had a 3 x 3 inch block. With the dimensions and placement set, I could adjust my images to fit.  Simple Shapes Most die cutter machines come with their own software which converts images to plot points and cut li