Making Small Business Apparel

This week, I came up with the rather marvellous idea to attempt making small business apparel for me to wear at craft shows and markets. The goal was to advertise my small art business using my art and logo.

Catch up on my small business diaries on my Art Studio Tab!

I was given a sublimation printer and a heat press from my husband and children for my fiftieth birthday. Well, I still haven’t fully read the instructions, preferring instead to play about with both machines. I am better at remembering how best to use them and my preferred settings when I do it this way. Anyway, I’ve made a wall hanging for my art studio. Oh and a patchwork cover for my new sewing machine (another fiftieth birthday present from my lovely mum!).

I am getting better and better. The heat press is fabulous in terms of functionality, however it is not so marvellous in terms of usability. I’m not sure if it is because I am squeezed into such a small area (under the stairs) or if it is a design fault, but I find it quite cumbersome to use. That said, I have some ideas for improving this in the future. So hopefully I’ll get a bit quicker than I am currently.

Pin This!

Creating a Design

When making small business apparel, the first thing I needed to do was make some decisions regarding what I wanted to print. I went on to Etsy and searched for small business clothing. This gave me an idea of what looked good and what didn’t. For example, too many words and the message is lost. If the logo is small, it may not be noticeable or recognisable.

The design, I had decided, would be my art front facing and my logo on the back of the jumper. I had learnt by now that heat pressing worked best on a fabric with a high percentage of polyester. I Searched high and low for a cream polycotton sweater which had absolutely no image or marking on it. It took time, but I finally found one. I didn’t love it but it was inexpensive and met all the criteria.

Using Canva

I use Canva a lot for my small business. The paid version is well worth it for me, if only for the ability to get rid of the back ground of an image. This means I am able to isolate individual images from one of my paintings, remove the background so that only the desired image is left. This means I can turn these images into stickers, sticker sheets, design bookmarks using them and create a whole new painting…and this is what I did here:

The main problem I find with Canva is that, although they do have a flip horizontally or vertically button to flip an image, there is no ability to flip writing. When you use the heat press, any writing needs to be back-to-front. And if you want to use writing when making small business apparel, it’s super important to get the writing the right way around! I have found a roundabout method for doing this.

So, one of the two images above needs to be flipped in order for the writing to be the right way around once printed. To do this, I download the whole page as a JPEG onto my computer. I open up a new A4 document (this is the size of the image) in Canva and upload the downloaded image (if that makes sense?). Move the image into the document, resizing if necessary so that it comes to the edges of the document. Then use the flip button to flip it horizontally, and…voila…you have flipped the text:

Making Small Business Apparel using a Sublimation Printer

There are many ways of making small business apparel using your own images. Probably the easiest and cheapest is an iron on transfer. For this you need a normal printer, transfer paper (Amazon does a huge selection) and an iron. These can be transferred onto any colour fabric and tend to be beautifully vibrant images. The downside is that you are literally transferring the image from the paper onto the fabric. This gives the image a shiny stiffer surface feel than the un-printed family.

DTF is probably (for me) the hardest option, simply because I would have to ask a third party to print my work onto DTF paper. Etsy is a great place to find small businesses which do this. However, you will still need a heat press to be able to transfer the image onto the fabric.

Sublimation is my chosen method in making my small business apparel as I have both a sublimation printer and a heat press. I believe you can convert a normal printer to a sublimation one but I have no clue how and I think it nullifies any warranties.

I download the images from Canva and print them out on my sublimation printer (in this photo you can see my first attempt at printing where I’d forgotten to flip the image, but you get the idea!):

You can see here how lurid the sublimation printer prints. This is normal and results in a lovely clear image.

Heat Pressing the Sublimation Image onto Fabric

Trial and error has taught me to do the following before sublimating the image onto your fabric:

• Give your fabric a cursory press so that it lies completely flat. This will also help warm up the fabric prior to heat pressing with improves the final sublimated image
• Use a lint roller to take off any lint or dust from the area of fabric to be printed
• Using heat resistant tape, fix the image to the fabric
• If you are pressing a garment, make sure you only press a single layer. Sublimation transfers the ink onto the polyester fibres and can go through one layer and seep onto the underneath layer (ask me how I know!). I use silicon mats which whilst a bit slippy, work well.
• Use the correct settings. I have found that my press works best on polycottons at a temperature of 200 degrees celsius, firmly pressed for 60 seconds. The instructions suggest I use it at 170 degrees for 20 seconds. Ummm, no. That does not work. See? That’s why I never read instructions! Polycotton doesn’t begin to melt until around 250 degrees so I tried different temps and times until I found what worked.

I was really pleased by how it turned out!

I’ve included a short video of me making this sweater in my latest studio vlog. Lillie rather humorously models the end product 🤭

If you’d like to get all my posts via an email please do subscribe below:

I also write a newsletter which includes freebie printables, money off coupons for my art shop as well as news I may not share online. If you’d like to become part of our angelicscalliwags family please do sign up below: