Watch the Youtube Quick Video: 4th of July HTV/Iron-on T-shirt
What is htv? HTV stands for Heat Transfer Vinyl. It is also known as iron-on. With these materials, you can transform a plain, white tee, for example, into something creative and fun for you to wear. This breakdown includes a tutorial on how to create a simple design in Cricut Design Space and how to apply the HTV on your shirt with an iron. You can use this technique on any cotton/polyester material. I’ve used HTV on kitchen towels too!
This would probably be easier with a cricut press or any heat press machines, but I wanted to show you guys that it is possible to use an iron! But please note that an iron isn’t evenly heated throughout, so it will take longer. Focus on using mainly the middle, fat part of the iron, and it will work just fine!
Materials use:
- Siser Glitter EasyWeed – Blush (for the big star)
- Cricut Glitter Iron-on – Black Gold (for the smaller stars)
- Standard mat (green mat)
- Iron
- Flat surface or the ironing board worked just fine too
- Cricut weeder (to weed out the design)
Both Cricut Iron-On and Siser Easyweed were easy to use and both were effective. I don’t have a preference for either as they’re both awesome products!
Designing your logo in Cricut Design Space
- Click on shapes and choose the star
- Duplicate the star so that you have 3 of them
- Arrange and align the stars so that they’re in a straight line with just a little bit of overlap on their sides
- Weld the 3 overlapped stars together
- Click on text. We’re going to be writing USA, but for now just type in the U so that we can gauge the size the letters have to be to fit inside the welded stars.
- Choose your desired font
- Duplicated the U. Double click on it, and change the U to an S. Adjust the S as needed. Duplicate it. Double click on it, and change the S to an A
- Slice the U out of the welded stars. Do the same for the S and the A
- Optional: Change the color of the welded stars to match your material
- Adjust the size of the whole image as needed
- Add additional smaller stars for decoration
- Line them up and box them for easier weeding later. I did it this way so that I can figure out as I’m ironing them where to place them instead of having them already spread out in Cricut Design Space.
- Attach all of the little stars together to save space on the mat
- Box the welded stars together too for easy weeding. Remember to attach
- Make it!
- For iron-on, always mirror your image. Even though the little stars here don’t need to be mirrored since a star is a simple shape with equal sides, it’s always a good habit to just mirror everything. You will definitely need to mirror the welded stars because of the text
- Choose Glitter Iron-On as your setting if you’re using Glitter HTV/iron-on
- Leave the pressure to default and have your fine-point blade loaded onto Clamp B
Cutting Your Design
- Place your iron-on/htv on your mat shiny side down
- Press the blinking arrow to load your mat
- Press the blinking C to start cutting your design
- Press the blinking arrow again to unload your mat
- Repeat these steps for your 2nd iron/htv material
- Weed the excess material out from your designs
- Cut up the stars individually so that you can place them randomly onto the shirt
Ironing your design
- Iron the area on your t-shirt where you will be placing your design to preheat it
- Place the welded stars onto your shirt by placing it shiny/plastic side up
- Place a cotton or polyester towel on top of the plastic
- Put pressure on your iron for about 15 seconds per area that it covers. Make sure you’re covering every inch of your design. This process can take several minutes.
- Pull up the plastic slowly, if it’s not sticking, keep ironing.
- Once ready, pull the plastic off completely You can either pull it while it’s hot, or wait until it cools off. I’ve done it both ways, and it’s okay either way.
- Repeat the same steps for your smaller stars
And there you have it: your transformed t-shirt with your own design! How cool is that?!
Need more visualization of all the text above? Here’s the breakdown in pictures!
Cutting your materials: “Cricut Glitter Iron On – Black Gold” for the little stars and “Siser Glitter Easyweed – Blush” for the welded stars
Ironing your design
I hope the breakdown helped you to create your own customized t-shirt effectively using your Cricut machine. To see this all in action, check out the short Youtube video here. The EpicALLY blog also features breakdowns on other Youtube craft videos, including a gift card holder out of foil poster board, a Cricut vinyl craft project, and Cricut Design Space tutorials on grouping, attaching, welding, and more.
Any questions? Comment below!
(Purple Text in this post: hyperlink to the How to Make Your Own Customized T-shirt Youtube video and links to the Grouping, Attaching, and Welding breakdowns on this site.)
**I am currently NOT affiliated with any company, so all the views, products, ideas, and thoughts are my own with absolutely zero pay. If I ever become an affiliate or partner with any service, I will let you all know and provide the information in the post. In an age where there’s so much hyperbole, misinformation, and half-truths in order to make an extra buck or two, my brand EpicALLY, and I especially, will maintain complete transparency with my followers. This is a passion project of mine, so I will never resort to cheap tricks or lies to provide you with any product, service, or information.