Vinyl Cutting Vs Screen Printing

A couple of weeks ago I decided I absolutely had to have a vinyl cutter. How had I managed so long without one I said. In the end, preferring simplicity and a friend’s recommendation over the gamble of “something” cheaper off of eBay I purchased the Cameo Silhouette from mdpsupplies.co.uk for about £320 including a big bundle of vinyl’s, backing/transfer film, VAT and delivery.

Screen printed t-shirt Democratic People's
New Republic of Space Korea (on the Moon)

You could say the Silhouette is firmly aimed at the crafter market. It even has a picture of a girl on it and is sort of pastel coloured. The best thing about the machine is it’s software called Silhouette Studio, (I don’t think it runs on LINUX) which is slick and functional. The interface is really well done too. I’ve been impressed also with the trace function and the simplicity of working with the images you’d like to cut. A laser cutter with software this good would sell like hot cakes (take note HPC and others) and I can’t think it’ll be many years before we’ll see A4 sized cutters on the crafter market with similar functional software. Having software that works must increase sales through word of mouth and recommendations. After all I brought one, because I tried the software first, because the software was straight forward AND I could try it before buying the machine it eliminated some of the concerns I had about a cheaper machine with unknown software.

So far I’ve used the Silhouette to cut vinyl rather than paper. Having dabbled a bit with screen printing I could immediately see that I could get very good quality results from using heat transfer vinyl rather than a screen and ink. Screen printing can be very messy indeed. You need lots of space and time to do things and it’s easy to mess up. I was making a QR t-shirt (this would be quite hard on a vinyl cutter though) and made 3 or 4 different screens before I got the result I wanted, even then the ink didn’t look professional but blotchy and uneven. Then after you’ve made the t-shirt you have to dry it and clean up all your screens and squeegees. Doing something yourself is fun of course and I’d not discourage anyone from trying to make a thing they way they want to. It’s only after having messed about with screen printing that I feel I can move on to this simpler method. I almost certainly would never have considered vinyl cutting if I’d not already done a load of screen printing!

Vinyl cut logo

I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the chilling aspects of the cold War and have been wanting to make a t-shirt based on the 80s “Protect and Survive” civil defence leaflets for ages. After a bit of messing about with the image I was able to use Silhouette Studio to trace the logo and output a line to cut. I popped along to Tesco and purchased a £4 black t-shirt and it only took me about 30 minutes to cut, weed and apply the logo.

Vinyl cut layers the backing needs
to be just a simple circle next time!

Weeding is where you pick all the unwanted bits off your vinyl. It’s the most tedious part of using the vinyl cutter though it does have the same satisfaction (at times) as popping bubble wrap or scrapping the silver stuff off scratch cards. My brother showed me an Aperture Laboratories t-shirt he was going to pay £15 for. Instead I found the required logo and cut him one out. He can now iron that on any t-shirt he likes and it cost less than £1. The possibilities for customising t-shirts is pretty much endless, you just have to have a few “original” ideas!

I’m working on a standard t-shirt for Nottingham Hackspace. I’m hoping to stock them in the vending machine if they can be folded small enough. The Hackspace logo is “Lincoln Green” which is a dark green. This means it only really shows up nicely on light colours. It also tends to look black against colours like yellow and light blue. Being of “powerful” build myself (ahem) I prefer a darker colour t-shirt. This means that it’s really difficult to make a t-shirt with a dark green logo. To make the green standout on any colour I’ve been experimenting with layering the vinyl. The green going on top of an under layer of white. Here are the results. As pointed out the shape of my white layer isn’t great on this example though I’m pleased with the layering generally and I’ll hopefully be able to either use a white circle (worried it’ll look a bit 1939 though) or some sort of shape like an ink splash or something. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

If you’d like a custom t-shirt or laptop sticker making or one of the designs in this blog post please do comment or email mechickengrylls@gmail.com and I’d be very happy indeed to help you out!