Have you ever had that light bulb flash above your head and envisioned the perfect HTV project that you just cannot wait to start? Okay, well what about that moment when you got so excited to make that something that when you ordered your blanks, you didn't even pay attention to what it was made of? Yeahhhh…that's how this whole thing started.
Originally, I wanted multi-colored dinosaurs in an all-over print on this swim suit, but my lack of attention to detail stole that idea away from me pretty quick. The plain black swimsuit that I ordered on Amazon for a whopping 10 bucks is made of 80% nylon and the other 20% spandex. That being said, most heat transfer vinyl is out of the question. Just like that my perfect HTV swimsuit project was no more.
But then, I remembered that our newest addition to our iron on vinyl selection would apply to uncoated nylons. It's also super thin and it stretches really well, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. Shimmer Heat Transfer Vinyl here for the win! Woot!
I traced some simple dinosaur silhouettes in Silhouette Studio and shrunk them down to about an inch in width. I tucked them neatly in a row and duplicated the row until I had almost a half of a sheet of tiny dinos. My design was ready to go, so I changed my settings over to heat transfer vinyl smooth, and adjusted my blade down to 1. To be honest, I had to go back to our website to double check on those settings.
One thing I found very difficult about the Shimmer was finding which side to stick down on the mat. If you run into that problem, an easy way to tell is to use your weeding tool to peel up just a wee little bit of heat transfer vinyl from a corner. Once you can determine which is the vinyl side and which is the carrier side, you can place the sheet of Shimmer carrier side down & vinyl side up on the mat.
Once I had all of that straightened out, I sent my design to cut.
I weeded out my little dinosaurs with little effort. The Shimmer is a little more stretchy than standard vinyl and it's certainly thinner, so it just takes a few seconds to get used to the difference. Slow and steady at first and you'll have no problems.
I used scissors to cut my dinos apart. I placed them in the pattern that I had wanted, and then I moved them around for about 15 minutes because I was indecisive. I'm sure you know how that goes.
On the front of the bathing suit bottoms, I was able to use the heat press to apply the dinos. For the back of the bottoms and the bikini top, I tacked each one down with an iron for a few seconds since the area was so small and had so many seams and creases. Afterward, I went back and pressed for a few more seconds on the pink press. It was finally all done, I just had to wait until it cooled since Shimmer is a cold peel. I pulled off the carrier sheet pieces and BAM! There ya have it guys! My Shimmer dino bikini!
