The Best Shirt for Infusible Ink: A Beginner’s Guide

The Best Shirt for Infusible Ink

Photo by Jusdevoyage on Unsplash

Everything with polyester, white, or light-colored is the best shirt for infusible ink!  If you still want to learn more about experimenting with the shirts to use on your infusible ink, here is a beginner’s guide and we’ll walk you through it.  Excited? Let’s begin.  

So the idea of shirt crafting makes you so excited but you don’t want to waste your time, effort, and resources.

So, to be sure, read on and you’ll learn the best shirt for infusible ink.

Why Infusible Ink is the Newbie’s Friend?

Infusible ink is the newbie’s friend because they say the big difference between infusible ink and sublimation printing is the idea that the former is already pre-printed with designs and its process is just cut and pressed.  Hence, it is referred to as the new generation sublimation.

What is Infusible Ink?

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink

Infusible Ink is an ink transfer material or a set of DIY products that make possible professional prints that look one with the material, with simple steps.  These prints are as professional as they look.

Why?  The designs stay beautiful longer as they have bright and vivid colors as if they are embedded in your shirt. This is the feature that infusible ink flaunts.  The designs stay on your material because they won’t crack, peel, or tear off.

There are two ways to accomplish your infusible ink transfers:  First, through Infusible Ink Transfer Sheets, and second, through  Infusible Ink pens and markers.

Infusible Ink Transfer Sheets

infusible ink pens

Infusible Inks come in either Infusible Ink Transfer Sheets or  Infusible Ink Pens.  These Transfer Sheets are pre-printed sheets, of course, containing infusible inks that are designed to work with a Cutting Machine.

With just your cutting mat and your machine, you can have your designs ready to be transferred onto your t-shirt.  Then, the pressing will seal the design to your blank making it permanently infused to it!

How does this work?

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink

Image from Shopee

Crafting with Infusible Ink is fun because it is amazing to look at a design on your transfer sheet transferring onto your material.  

The design on your transfer sheet is in a solid state, just like any other regular ink.

You put it in your preset Cutting Machine by loading it on your cutting mat.

Once you load it on your machine, the design you set will be cut out

You’ll be amazed at the Science of how this Infusible Ink works.  The colored ink on the paper is in a solid state.

Working with Infusible Ink
Image from TeckWrap

 

So when the design you’ve loaded into your machine will come out ready to be applied over your material, by applying heat onto it, the chemical transformation makes it possible to be infused into the fabric.

flock htv
Image from TeckWrap

 

Then once the heat is removed and it cools down, this cooling down will turn the design into gas which will be embedded in your t-shirt!

How could something that turned into gas be embedded into your material?  

flock htv
Image from TeckWrap

 

Once the heat is removed and your project cools down, the ink turns back into a solid within your project and is now permanently infused into it.

Infusible Ink Pens and Markers

infusible ink pens
Image from Shopee

 

The Infusible Ink pens and markers are like regular pens. The only difference is that you don’t draw directly onto it but onto a sheet of copy paper.  Then the design you draw onto the copy paper is transferred by using a heat press.  The heat of the machine pressed onto the project will eject the infusible ink from the design made by the pens and markers, infusing it.

Recommended Materials for Use with Infusible Ink

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink

 

There are recommended materials for use with Infusible Ink and they are called Infusible Ink compatible blanks.  These materials, such as shirts, tote bags, coasters, and mugs, just be made from polyester or poly-coated to work with Infusible Ink products.

There are generic products that are sublimation-compatible that may work with Infusible Ink but not all of them can produce great results.  Not all the t-shirts that you want to work on will be compatible with infusible ink; resorting to other printing methods will not be an option but a must.

Infusible Ink applied to a higher polyester shirt, for example, will have better transfers. So if you ask, does infusible ink work on any t-shirt, or a black shirt, for example?  The answer can be a “YES” and a “NO” depending on your creativity and resourcefulness.

How to Use Infusible Ink on 100% Cotton Shirt

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink
Image from Shopee

 

Sad to say, Infusible Ink products cannot work on a 100% cotton shirt.  This is because the Infusible Ink heat-transfer process requires specially engineered polymer or polyester-based substrates.  

These substrates are materials manufactured to comply with this kind of ink as a permanent bond.  And works best on white or light-colored surfaces with high polyester count.

But if you really insist to use infusible ink on 100% cotton there is a process that you may resort to using a solution that can bind infusible ink with shirts that do not have polyester surfaces.

Many have tried applying infusible ink on cotton shirts but the prints on them were not super vibrant and faded with just one wash.  Essentially, sublimation has been the go-to method if you want to achieve pro-level, personalized, heat transfer on t-shirts.  Now, there is the infusible ink shirt that shouts for an easier process for hobby crafters.

What shirt is best for Infusible Ink?

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink

A 100% polyester shirt is best for Infusible Ink transfers.  Truth be told.  Since Infusible Ink works best on 100% polyester, when this material isn’t available what will work second best is something that has more polyester than other materials.  20/80 cotton-polyester t-shirts work better with infusible ink than a 50-50 for your Infusible Ink transfers.

But if you are more about comfort than the design, then choose a more comfortable cotton shirt.  There are different types of cotton t-shirts.  The most popular cotton shirt is PIMA cotton.  

Pima cotton has long fibers making it remarkably soft and super strong.  Clothes made of Pima cotton are smooth and resistant to fraying, tearing, wrinkling, piling, and fading.

Infusible Ink on 40/60 polyester-cotton t-shirt

So now, what blank t-shirts are you going to use infusible ink on?  What if the only shirt available has a 40/60 polyester cotton, can you still use it?  Yes, you can still print on it, but it won’t stay long.  After around three washes it won’t be visible, or will just be a shadow of your original design.

Infusible Ink on 65/35 polyester-cotton t-shirt

Using Infusible Inks on a 65/35 polyester-cotton will result in a print that looks like it has been washed several times.  Yes.  Since Infusible Ink cannot embed well into non-polymer materials, once you still use it on such materials, do not expect the best results with your infusible ink transfer sheet.

What shirt color can have the best results?

A white shirt will have the best results when using infusible ink.  But if you want to get away with white shirts try using light-colored shirts.  And the darker your designs are the better they will show on your shirts.

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink

But what if you want to use a darker fabric with your infusible ink sheets?  Wondering if you could use shirts with dark colors and still come up with vibrant designs? How about with a black shirt?

Are Black and Dark-Colored Fabrics OK or Not?

 

The Best Fabric for Infusible Ink
Image from TeckWrap

 

Technically, white or light-colored shirts are more submissive to infusible ink transfers but we all could use some revealing dark-colored shirts.  Yes!  How?

When infusible ink transfer sheets are applied directly on black shirts, the design will not show up.  But many have discovered a technique they call layering, where the Infusible ink is put on the white layer, and it works!

How to Use Infusible Ink on 100% Cotton

If you don’t want to use a polymer shirt that’s made for Infusible Inks then you may want to try this process so you can use Infusible Ink on 100% Cotton.

Materials:

  • 100% cotton shirt
  • Infusible Ink Transfer Sheets
  • Cotton Infusible Ink solution
  • Lint roller

Process:

  1. Spread your fabric on a flat surface, with the part exposed, facing you.
  2. Be sure to preset your Cotton Infusible Ink Solution spray to “fine mist” to ensure that it will not soak your fabric.
  3. Saturate the area where you’re going to transfer the image.
  4. Once the area is saturated, fold the fabric, and press the solution to it.
  5. Be sure it’s not soaking with the solution.  You don’t want that. You just want a fine mist.
  6. Dry the fabric that has been misted by hanging the t-shirt, throwing the t-shirt in the dryer, putting parchment paper over the t-shirt then pressing for 60 seconds using a heat press, or using a blow dryer. Whatever method you use, the main goal is to dry the shirt.
  7. Once the shirt has dried up, you know it’s ready for the second cycle of the process.
  8. Do the same process, from laying the shirt with the side where you’ll put the design facing you.
  9. Then, spray the solution in “mist” mode.
  10. Fold the shirt again and then press.
  11. Now, dry the shirt using either of the four methods previously mentioned.
  12. When it’s completely dry, spread it again on the table.
  13. Use a lint roller, to remove unwanted fibers from the shirt.  
  14. Remember that how much fading it will undergo depends on how well you print the designs.
  15. Put a paper bag in between the shirt so the ink doesn’t bleed to the back of the shirt.  The paper bag will act as a protective layer.
  16. Then position your cut transfer sheet on the part where you want your design to be, of course facing down.
  17. Lay a parchment paper on top of the design, positioning it well for the heat press.
  18. Press for 60 seconds at 400 degrees.
  19. Let it cool off completely before removing the parchment paper.

And be amazed at your infused design!

White Glitter HTV or Iron On with 100% Cotton

glitter white fabric for infusible ink

 

 

TeckWrap’s White Glitter HTV on 100% cotton to layer on your infusible ink is a technique that has been around for a while.

You may use a shirt with a poly-cotton blend or any shirt material for that matter.  The type of shirt doesn’t matter as your base material because you’ll be applying infusible ink on the white glitter HTV not on the shirt itself.

With the same process in preparing your shirt plus using a lint roll and all to ensure the fabric is free from lints, cut the image mirrored on the HTV and the transfer sheets.

Then place the HTV first and press at 385 degrees for 15 seconds.

When it is warm-peeled, carefully put the infusible ink over it.  Face down.  

Press for 40 seconds.

You’ll be surprised how this technique works!

Explore TeckWrap Craft’s HTV Designs and you might just stretch your creativity further.  Find more useful tips to handle Infusible inks!

glitter vinyl
cut settings for vinyl

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