Welcome to the next instalment of how to do your own self promotion. This is possibly our favourite.
Do you like the bag? We think this is lush and works out at about £3 per bag. Time and manual labour not included… Don’t forget when pricing things up to include how much time you spend on it.
We bought 10 plain tote bags from eBay, for less than £10. The more you buy, the cheaper it gets and should your business take off you could start sourcing suppliers and enjoy greater savings.
But to start off, eBay is cool. We also bought the heat transfer vinyl here too, however a word of advice; don’t automatically buy from eBay, the suppliers we found had the same product less than half price on their websites direct. We learnt this the hard way.
Your Cricut Explore should be set to vinyl which ensures that only the top layer is cut, leaving the transparent top layer intact. If you’re printing text, or your logo also ensure you set it to cut mirror image otherwise your text will be back to front.
Once cut you need to weed it – this is picking out all the white space areas of your logo – getting rid of anything that you don’t want to be transferred in the heat process. This is easy with the tools that come with the Cricut Explore. Start by carefully peeling off as much as you can, then ‘weed’ the rest out.
Then you’re ready to press!
If you have a heat press, get it warmed up – but you can also do it with an everyday hand iron. With a heat press, you need it under for 15 seconds on a high heat (follow the heat transfer vinyl instructions) but with a hand iron, you’ll need to apply even pressure moving all over for 90 seconds. We pressed straight onto the transparent layer (below), it didn’t melt or burn, thankfully.
Our first attempt didn’t stick, so we put it under for a further 10 seconds, left it to stand for another 10 seconds then very carefully peeled back the top transparent layer, leaving the logo perfectly affixed to the tote bag.
Once peeled back, we put it under the heat press once again for just 2 seconds to seal it.
We think it looks great, do you want one too?
The Cricut Explore costs £249 and is available from Amazon, Hobby Craft and other craft retailers.
