A new year and a new hobby. Although my hobbies always remain within the same interest. I see it as a bit of an extension of my hobby with the cameo. This year I received a sublimation printer as a gift from my husband. Well, not really a gift, but rather a new asset to print promotional material and t-shirts for his store.
I have already embroidered his logo on T-shirts and printed it with flex. The embroidery was a feat, a lot of work and extremely time-consuming with a hobby embroidery unit. It went very well with flex, but I thought you had a lot of loss and needed a lot of material. Printing multiple colors on top of each other is also not possible, especially because the flex simply releases after a certain time. Yes, I put everything in the dryer. If it doesn’t survive the dryer then it doesn’t work for me.
Which printer?
Which printer to choose to learn sublimation? I think it would be best to go for a sawgrass printer anyway. This is specifically made for sublimation and you will get the best results with the fewest problems. Although I have no experience with it myself. This is also a lot more expensive to purchase, both in terms of the printer and the ink.
But I opted for a cheaper solution. Especially because I don’t really know if sublimating is one thing. And after doing some reading, the Epson ET-2712 really seemed like a nice printer to start with. I bought the starter pack to make A4 prints from Plotterfoil. I received 100 sheets of sublimation paper, the printer and 4 bottles of 100ml ink. You must use Plotterfoil sublimation ink yourself for 1 year so that you continue to enjoy your warranty on the printer. If you simply buy an eco-tank printer and put sublimation ink in it yourself, your warranty will immediately expire as these printers are not made to work with sublimation ink. So buy a sublimation package from a store that also gives you a warranty.
The Epson ET-2712 Starter Kit
As I said, the ET-2712 comes with 4 bottles of premium sublimation ink and 4 syringes with needle to fill the printer. Make sure that when you fill you do not suck too much air into your syringe and that you do not empty it into the tank too quickly. Otherwise the ink will foam and come out at the top. Do you have this in mind? Then wait a while until everything has settled down nicely again. The ink that comes with it is more than enough to get started. You certainly don’t have to buy it immediately.
The supplied 100 sheets of paper are certainly sufficient to get started. Even though this paper states that it is for hard surfaces, you can still use it to print polyester clothing. Make sure that your clothing consists of at least 70% polyester. The less polyester there is in your fabric, the poorer the quality of your print.
This is what’s in the starter pack. Enough to get started? Yes, but make sure you order blank sublimation supplies. Don’t have anything at home to sublimate? Then this starter package is of little use to you.
What you should definitely buy: Blanks that you can sublimate and a heat press (you cannot sublimate without this). If you want to sublimate on cotton, you will have to buy additional subli-flex, but I will talk about that in another post.
Testing the Printer
Were you, like me, very excited to try out the printer? And you don’t have any blanks at home yet? But you can’t wait, can you? Well then I have a trick that will probably help you. Because yes, I was very enthusiastic and over the moon with my gift. But as I said, when you receive the starter package, you don’t have anything to sublimate yet, so you have to order this again. Of course I did this immediately. But I already wanted to make something so I started looking among the things I had.
A small hack to sublimate something
What do you need? An object with a flat surface, laminating pouches, your press and sublimation printer with paper.
Take your laminating film and tear the 2 sides apart. This way you have 2 sheets with an adhesive side.
Cut your laminating film to the size of your surface to be printed. I did this with the cameo, you can also do this with a knife or scissors.
Place the cut-to-size laminating film with the matte side down on your surface to be printed. In my case a key ring. Press this for about 10 seconds at 150°. Do this on both sides. (In my case)
The press at work.
Both sides covered with laminating foil.
Print the image you want on your surface to be printed as a mirror image with your sublimation printer. My settings are: paper type – epson matte / high speed disabled / quality – high / mirror image.
Put this face down on your (in my case) key ring and press at 180° for 60 sec.
This way I could test my printer. The print turned out very nicely, but the colors appear a lot darker on the wood.
You can install a color profile via the plotter foil site, but I don’t use this. When I use the color profile everything seems a lot redder.
Here you can find the key rings I used.
A few more examples made with the ET-1712
Bags
Textile
This is the only drawback I have experienced with this printer so far. When printing on subliflex or easy subli, the printer draws dotted lines through the drawing. This is done by the transport cogs at the front of the printer. They roll through the still wet ink. Tried many settings but nothing that works yet. I will write a post about this later.
Puzzle
I thought this was one of the coolest things to print. I ordered the puzzles themselves from Ali and they were delivered very quickly.
Here you can buy the puzzles I used. I am very satisfied with this. Nice quality print.
Keychains
These are also super easy to make, I tested several here. Below you will find the links where you can purchase these. More about this in another post .
- _CDL_MASK_415__Corona helper with flowers
- Rectangle MDF (dark print / brown back)
- Square MDF (2 sides printable)
- Rectangle Aluminum (2 sides printable, my favorite)
Decision:
+ points:
- Cheap
- Makes beautiful prints
- Easy to use
- Low consumption ink
- Ecotank is cost-saving and convenient, no need to buy cartridges. Less pollution.
– points:
- Draws dotted lines through printing on subli-flex and easy-subli.
In other words, very satisfied and definitely recommended.