Welcome back to the craft room and today’s Let’s Make a T-shirt with Siser Glitter HTV post. The Bobstock Music Festival is this coming weekend, July 12 – 13, 2024, and I need a concert T-shirt. Today I am going to be making that shirt in honor of the Saturday night headliner, Three Dog Night. I am super excited and what better way to express that joy than with a gold glitter shirt. Today I will share with you how I made my concert shirt with Siser Glitter HTV and my HTVRont Auto Heat Press. If you would like, I have a corresponding YouTube video that you can watch, or hang out here with me and see how it all came together.
Designing The Graphics
Even though I wanted to have a fun design on my shirt, I also wanted to keep it rather simple. I decided to take inspiration from one of the band’s album covers. While there were so many that caught my eye, I stuck with a more simple idea. The album cover “Joy to the World The Best of Three Dog Night” shown below is my inspiration. I did a search of the fonts on my computer and found that Vintage Mother from Creative Fabrica, and Rockwell seemed to be the best representations of the fonts on the album. With this information, it was off to Cricut Design Space.
Cricut Design Space
After measuring my t-shirt I decided to make my finished design between 9” and 10” wide. With this information, I began making my design. I started with the band’s name, using the font Vintage Mother in size 200. I typed each word separately so I would be able to manipulate the title to better fit my idea. One thing to keep in mind when working with a script font, even though it looks like one word that will cut out as one, that is not the case. As you can see in the image below, where two letters meet and overlap there is a visible line. The Cricut machine will cut them apart on those lines.
There is an easy way to fix this, and that is to “weld” the letters together to make it one word. In order to accomplish this task you first start with ungrouping the letters. On my laptop, the option “Ungroups to Letters”, is available on the text menu bar under “Advanced”. On the iPad, this function is available under the Actions panel, then click on “Isolate”.
After ungrouping the letters, you will be able to manipulate each individual letter. When you are finished positioning the letters, or if you are just trying to have the word cut as one, choose “Combine” and then “Weld”. One thing to keep in mind, after ungrouping the word it is no longer considered a font. So any spell checking needs to be done before this point.
I adjusted each word in the band’s name in this same fashion. However, I did make a few other adjustments before welding the words together. When working with the word Dog, I adjusted the letters O and G a little high. I also moved them closer to the D so they would touch. I made a small adjustment to the word Night by adding a bit more space between the N and the rest of the letters. When I was happy with the final adjustments I highlighted all three words and chose Weld.
For the song title, Joy To The World, I used the font Rockwell Bold in size 78. I wanted to add a bit of flair to this portion of the design so I used the “Curve” function. After typing out my design in all caps, I highlighted the entire line and chose “Curve” from the Text panel. This is such a fun feature to play around with. You can go all the way up to 100 for a perfect circle if so desired. I chose a happy medium for the song title at 55.
The final bit of text for my t-shirt design was to include Bobstock ‘24. I used the same font and size as I did for the song title, Rockwell Bold in size 78. I decided to leave this portion of text in a straight line though. When I was happy with the design, I added a square around it to act as a weeding box. I then attached the text and box together in preparation for cutting.
To cut the Siser Glitter HTV I made sure to “mirror” my image. I then chose the Glitter Iron-on cut setting with more pressure. To weed the design I used the Cricut weeding tool and my Pin Pen weeding tool for finer details.
Pressing the Image with the HTVRont Auto Heat Press
To prep the Gildan Ladies V-neck T-shirt for pressing it is always a good idea to pre-heat the garment. This not only removes any wrinkles in the fabric, but also any moisture that may prevent the heat transfer vinyl from adhering. I then used a lint roller to remove any dirt or fibers from the pressing area. While I was working on this my HTVRont Auto Heat Press was warming up. If you watched the corresponding YouTube video, you know I read my notes wrong for the time and temperature. My brain was focused on the time and temp for Siser EasyWeed at 305 degrees for 12 seconds. This is NOT the proper time or temp for the Glitter material. It should have been set for 320 degrees for 15 – 20 seconds!!
Even though I had the Siser HTV Time/Temp Chart from Snip To It in front of me, I did not read it. Having said that, I did read the chart enough to know that it needed to be a warm peel. The suggested wait time is at least 15 seconds. Lesson learned right? lol
Because the time and temperature was incorrect, it did take three presses to completely adhere the Glitter HTV. Having said that, there were only two places where I had issues. After the first press, peeling from right to left, I had issues with the top of the “T” in the word Three. After the second, peeling the cover sheet from left to right, I had issues with the “J” in the word Joy. The third and final press is where I realized my mistake. By this time all of the HTV was securely adhered to the shirt. I did decide to up the temperature of the HTVRont heat press to 315 degrees for one final 12 second press to complete the design. And what a beautiful design it turned out to be!
As with all glitter products, it is very difficult to see just how beautiful and sparkly it really is. The photo below gives a really good view of the incredible sparkle the Old Gold Siser Glitter HTV has.
Thank you so much for joining me for today’s Let’s Make a T-shirt with Siser Glitter HTV post. I am really looking forward to the Bobstock Music Festival next weekend and showing off my creation! Have you ever used Siser Glitter HTV before? If you have, let me know what you think of it down in the comments. Check out some of my other Cricut Crafts as well. Until then, have a fantastic week and I will see you back in the craft room again soon!
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