Wed, 10 Jan 2024
I love marine vinyl for outdoor-safe projects and stuff, but it's limited to the colors people want to put on boat seats and clearly doesn't encompass "looks faded/yellowed" colors. So I'm expanding my color options with heat-transfer vinyl.
Brilliant yellow is fun for a lot of things, and you'll see it show up in some renditions of the Pitcher Perfect Pack, but for the baby and bridal shower versions I didn't want something that screamed. And after a couple of mail-order vinyls that looked mellower, were described as mellower, turned out to be emoji-colored, I finally tried something I have wanted to try for awhile: HTV.
You don't want to get PVC, which a lot of faux leathers are, too hot. It's mostly chlorine, and nobody wants to free that up in their house. Can't remember if polyurethane (PU) is any better, so I play it safe especially with fabrics I am not very confident about the correctness of its labeling. But it turns out it doesn't take much heat at all to bond HTV to marine vinyl. I'd be more scientific about it if I was, say, bonding Silhouette-cut letters to it, but I'm stitching the stuff down anyway so all I need is for it to hold on long enough to embroider. And it did! I didn't even bust out the sharps, it did fine with an embroidery universal needle.
I didn't get out the proper heat press and my househld iron doesn't have actual temperature markings, but it was well below the steam point. I have read 140F in some sources, so that's what I was approximating. I put down some parchment in addition to the HTV's backing since it wasn't as big as the marine vinyl piece, and hit it fairly briefly a couple times.
I also got some specialty HTV (you know I'm a sucker for iridescents and holos) so I'll probably try more in the near future.