A Vinyl-Made T-shirt Of Your Own Design

Recently, I had a friend ask me to make her a shirt using a design that she had created, so I thought I'd walk you through the process of how to do this for yourself! Here is what needs to happen - we need to get this design onto this shirt.

First thing's first, scan in the design and save it to your computer in jpg format. Once that's done, import it into your Silhouette Studio. To do this, open up your Silhouette Studio,

Once it's open, drag your scanned image onto the page.

As you can see, the image is much to big as is, so we need to reduce the size. To do this, you will zoom out 2-3 times so you can see the entire image. To zoom out, press the minus sign magnifying glass.

Once it is zoomed out enough to see your whole image, scale it down by clicking on the image and then grabbing a corner of the image until you get it to the size you want.

After that comes the fun part - tracing the image! First, click the "fit to window" button (which is the last button on the right from the zoom out button.) This will bring your image back to a more easy-to-use and see size.

Now, you are going to trace your image, to do this, go over to the right side of your silhouette studio program and select the box with the blue "x" in it.

After you get there, your right side bar should look like this:

Click on "Select Trace Area." Then, select the area you want traced. The area you want traced will be highlighted with yellow. Unselect "High Pass Filter" (which is in the toolbar on the right.)

Once you have unselect "High Pass Filter" your image should look like this:

At this point, you will want to select "Trace" from the right hand menu. There will be red trace lines around your image and you can then move the rest of the image away from what you have traced. This is also a good way to confirm that the traced image is how you want it to be.

Go ahead and delete the original image now and measure your shirt to see how large you want the design to be. A lot of times, I just measure the shirt without the image, but my friend wanted this image to be fairly true to size that she made it, so I didn't necessarily need to measure the shirt.

After you have the image at the size you are wanting it, you are going to need to mirror the image. To do this, you will right click on the image, and select "Flip Horizontally."

Your image will flip and look backwards. Something similar to this:

Once you have your image the size you want it, and are ready to cut your vinyl, lay it on your cutting mat shiny side down. I have read that you don't need to use a mat at this point - but I prefer to, just to be on the safe side. 

Be sure your image is the size you want it to be, and then get ready to cut! I bought this vinyl from www.expressionsvinyl.com and they have a reference page for what settings to use on a Silhouette or A Cricut for cutting the vinyls they sell. To see their settings, go here. Once you have your settings right, do a test cut to be on the safe side if you like - or, if you like to live life on the wild side, go ahead and cut. 

After your image has been cut, you will want to weed out the parts you don't want. 

To see a video on this and the ironing on, you can check it out here. After you have weeded out the vinyl you don't want to use, you can set your image on the clothing you are wanting to apply it to. 

With the vinyl that I used, I just left the clear top on and got to work ironing.

I ironed for 15-20 seconds all over the shirt and then peeled off the top clear layer. If it doesn't come off easily, keep ironing.

Voila! It's done! We made a masterpiece shirt of our own design! Ok...it wasn't actually my design - it was my friend's design. Ten points if you know what her design is in reference to! :)