Difference Between Heat Transfer Vinyl And Screen Printing

No it s not because i needed another excuse to buy craft supplies.

Difference between heat transfer vinyl and screen printing.

If you ve been following me on instagram you may have noticed my new obsession hobby is screen printing with oracal 651 vinyl. Screen printing produces better quality printings than heat transfer. With that being said let s look at the pros and cons of each of these methods. For years i had been making heat transfer vinyl shirts with.

Since i shared my first screen printing tutorial many of you have asked why i prefer screen printing over heat transfer vinyl. With the vinyl heat transfer process a machine is used to cut out designs and letters in pieces of colored vinyl. One of the most common questions we get here at monograms by k k is what is the difference between screen printing and vinyl printing. Vinyl is well suited for very small runs which we would consider anything from 1 to 12 shirts this is because the set up time is much quicker than that of screen printing.

Common kinds of heat transfer printing include vinyl heat transfer and digital print heat transfer. We use vinyl printing here which is essentially cutting designs out of different colors of vinyl our multitude of vinyl rolls are pictured and then heat pressing them on to a garment. In this method you need actual screens. Vinyl printing depends on a combination of pressure and heat.

Vinyl printing is all about heat transfer. It was invented by a company known as sato but the heat press machine was only invented in the 80s. This doesn t make it a faster overall method though as every shirt still requires individual set up which becomes too time consuming beyond the 12 shirt mark. Think iron on transfer but with a really big really.

Heat transfer printing on the other hand did not start until the 1940s.