Living in a Material World

Suppliers offer an enormous range of materials for garment graphic cutters, giving your shop more decorating options than ever.
April 1, 2008

How easy a material is to weed is one consideration when choosing your supplier. Material with a sticky backing is better for designs with finer detail, plus, if you peel something up, you can save it and put it back down. (Photo courtesy of Imprintables Warehouse.)

By Josh Ellsworth

A decorator’s choices in material for vinyl used to be pretty straightforward: You could use your vinyl cutter to cut, well, vinyl.

Today it’s a different story, with advancements giving decorators the choice of various durable, yet soft, versatile materials that work well on a wide variety of substrates. The majority of films still work well on cotton and cotton/polyester blends, but some new materials mean you can use your garment graphics cutter to decorate nylon, performance fabrics, leather, and even Lyrca Spandex.

Material Options
There are three main considerations when choosing a CAD-cut material. What substrates it can be applied to, what it’s made from, and the finished look. Suppliers offer materials that can be adhered to everything from apparel and bags to backpacks, umbrellas, and koozies. What determines if a material will bond to a particular substrate is what adhesive it’s made with. That’s why if you’re unsure about whether a material will apply to a substrate or fabric, ask the supplier for a sample and test it out.

Most cutter materials are made out of one of two things: PVC or polyurethane. PVC is essentially plastic and not layerable whereas polyurethane layers quite nicely and is more often than not much softer.

The third criterion for choosing a material is how it looks. There are a wide range of  finishes and patterns available include glitter, reflective, flock, electric, metallic, and even patterns such as camouflage or stars and stripes. Materials also come in high gloss, satin, and matte finishes.

There also is a completely unique category of cutter materials sometimes referred to as “print and cut.” As the name suggests, this category is designed to be printed using a solvent-based inkjet printer and then contour cut. You must use either a printer/cutter unit or you run the material through an inkjet printer and then a cutter. For the purposes of this article, we will be restricting our discussion to only cutter materials; however, a printer/cutter combination unit opens the door to numerous new decorating options.

Cut it, Weed it, Heat it
With all the myriad options available in materials, you’re going to basically do the same thing with all of them: cut, weed, and heat apply the material to a substrate. When shopping for materials, you want to evaluate how easily the roll goods handle each of these three steps.

Cutting. Sometimes you’ll receive rolls with splices in them, where the color stops and picks up again. Even if the area is only a millimeter or two, it could ruin a job, so make sure the rolls are marked to show the spliced areas, allowing you to plan jobs accordingly. Also, the material should be rolled onto the roll core straight, or it may feed into your machine incorrectly.

Test the material to see how easily it cuts and how much force is required from the cutter. Typically, a thinner material takes less force, but poor-quality materials may pucker or wrinkle. Also, notice how well the material holds intricate details, such as branches of a tree. Ideally, you also want a material where you can see the cut lines. Otherwise, it takes much longer to weed. 

Weeding. Test the material to see how easily it weeds. How long does it take you to peel or remove the material? Does it break or rip when you’re weeding away large pieces?

Another consideration for weeding: Determine whether you want material with a sticky or nonsticky backing. Material with sticky backing is better for designs with finer detail, plus, if you peel something up, you can save it and put it back down. Also, during the heat-application process, you can tack it down to the shirt because of its stickiness, almost like a spray tack during the embroidery process. This makes positioning a faster, easier task.

However, some decorators prefer nonsticky backing, and suppliers offer this option too; ultimately, it’s just a matter of figuring out your personal preference.

Heating. Test the material at different heat times and temperatures to see how it performs. Some materials may require multiple applications, or hits, for instance, where you heat it, release the backing and add a cover sheet, then hit it again. Naturally, the fewer hits you have, the quicker the production process.

Another consideration is how the backing peels off after it’s applied. Some materials are hot peel, which is quicker, while others are cold peel, requiring you to wait for them to cool down.

Finally, take a critical look at the finished results, as well as the material’s durability, which you can test by seeing how well it holds up after a few washes. Durability varies from material to material, depending on the supplier, so take your time selecting a brand or brands for your shop. The color shouldn’t fade, and you shouldn’t see peeling, crackling, or wrinkling. Also, look for bleeding; red fabrics shouldn’t turn white materials pink.



Making the Most of It
Materials with stronger adhesives generally cost a bit more, as do materials with specialty finishes. Base colors generally cost about one cent per square inch, while material with stronger adhesive — for nylons, for instance — will cost about 1.5 cents per square inch, and specialty materials (glitter, reflective, etc.) costs 2 cents or more per square inch.

That difference doesn’t sound like much when you’re thinking in terms of square inches, but it may when you look at it in terms of rolls. For instance, a five-yard roll of a base color may cost $35, while that same roll in a glitter finish will cost about $70.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to get maximum mileage out of each roll. Hopefully you have a cutter that can read the sheet size from the computer, which will then allow you to rotate the design and space things in a way that gets the most out of the material — a process called “nesting.” Some cutters can even reclaim scrap material by allowing you to re-feed it through.

Standard materials range from 9 to 20 inches wide. Typically, you are stuck with whatever width that material comes in. They are not available in a selection of widths. If you have a 24-inch wide cutter, you will be able to use any of the standard-width sizes.

Garment graphics cutter material isn’t especially delicate, but it’s still a good idea to store it in a climate-controlled area rather than, say, a foot away from your dryer.

When you’re choosing material for your shop’s cutter, be sure to give yourself plenty of time to test out all of the considerations mentioned. Doing so may take awhile, but it will help you choose the right brand and material for your jobs — and in the long run, that will make it a worthwhile investment.

Josh Ellsworth has been in the garment decoration industry for eight years, working for the past six years as an account representative for Imprintables Warehouse. He manages his own blog at joshellsworth.com, entitled Heat Press Yourself. His Web site offers weekly articles, tutorials and videos that explore that art of T-shirt decoration with a heat press.

Click here to view the entire Cutters series.

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Diversifying Your Customer Base  
Learn to evaluate and adjust your mix of clientele for optimum profitability and stability.
While the economic lows that many American markets have been experiencing for the past year are certainly painful, they’re also nothing new. Historically, the tide of business success continually ebbs and flows, with one market experiencing a rush of good fortune while another watches its revenue all but dry up. This cyclical nature of business is precisely why decorators must have a diverse customer base that allows them to weather slowdowns — or even meltdowns — in parts of the economy.
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