noojo

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7 Steps For Making Great Iron-On TShirt Transfers

There are alot of great sites on the net for making custom tshirts, but all of them suffer from the same core problems:

  • they have limited tshirts to choose from.
  • you must place the image where they say to.
  • it will cost you at least $20 bucks to find out the design doesnt look so hot after all.

Also there’s alot to be said for the immediate gratification of a one-off iron-on!

So, here are my tricks for getting the best results:

  1. Make your design with a white background, at least 150dpi (300 is better).
  2. Check your printer drivers “advanced settings” or “properties”. Usually they will have settings for TShirt Transfers that will not only put the printer into High Quality mode, but also reverse the image for you.
  3. Using an x-acto knife, cut out the design from the transfer paper. Leave a small border of space around the edges. You dont need to cut perfectly on the lines.
  4. Get the iron pre-heated on its hottest setting. Make sure your surface is clean and low enough for you to press down on really hard.
  5. Position your design wherever you want on the shirt. This is the best part of this process vs. the online vendors. Remember you can print out extra designs for a sleeve patch or collar border - whatever.
  6. Iron directly on the transfer. Dont put anything between the iron and the shirt. You want all the heat you can get. Press down really hard while you move the iron around. Dont linger, or you’ll burn the shirt. Keep this up for about 3 minutes. The idea here is to melt the glue off the backing and into the shirt fabric a bit instead of just onto the top layer. This will make it last longer and help prevent cracking.
  7. Remove the shirt from the ironing area and allow it to cool. Once its cool, take your xacto blade and gently pry up one of the corners/edges of your design. Peel off the paper slowly.

That’s it! It’s a little tricky, but fun to do and pretty cheap as well. It’s also a great way to prototype a design you might want to sell online, or a fun way to trick out a holloween costume.