Thanks.
I love making shirts for my kids. The cost savings I have had by making clothes for my kids has paid for the heat press many times over. I paid I think $650.00 for the press when I bought it and just for example, for my older daughter we did not have to buy one shirt for her for school this year (she will not wear anything but t-shirts right now) and made her about 12 new t-shirts. Depending on the shirt I buy for her, I can spend as low as $1.00+ up to about $5.00 for the blank shirts. It costs maybe $2.00 in EcoFilm per shirt. I looked and the 12 shirts I bought her with shipping were $40.68 and so after pressing them I spent around $65.00 for 12 shirts which is less than $5.50 per shirt. If I went and got he t-shirts at someplace like Justice you will spend around $15.00 to $20.00 per shirt. So just on her 12 shirts I saved at least $120.00. You can buy a cheaper press for around $300.00 at a place like Coastal Business Supply.
Yeah the transfer papers you can buy at Staples and places like that are not so great. I use commercial ones that I don't think would work with an iron, I don't think it gets hot enough. For the papers I use I think I need to set my press to around 375 degrees and press for about 20 seconds straight. With an iron I doubt it gets that hot and you can't cover the whole image at once unless really small. I only really do transfer papers on white shirts because with the papers for white shirts are transparent and your white of your shirt shows through and you don't need to trim perfectly though I do trim pretty close to the edge of the image as I don't want a visible box around the design. The papers for colored shirts are opaque white that you print on because you can't print white on a printer. Those types of papers you need to trim perfectly so you don't have a white edge around your image. My cutter actually lets you print images on your computer with registration marks and then you can feed your printed image into the cutter and it will trim around your image for you but you need Adobe Illustrator to use that feature but I can't bring myself to spend the $600 dollars on illustrator just for that. At least not at this point I won't spend it.
