Initial Ideas
For the heat press, I decided on using this white pair of pants I got from Florida as my garments of choice, that say Marco Island on the side of them. They are white pants so I thought it would be good to use to add some color. My initial ideas were something to do with a jetski, or maybe sharks and fishermen. I wanted to have an ocean, or Florida vibe on the pants, so I thought this would best fit. I later decided on the Full Send Jetski Idea.
Design Process
The first thing I did was I created my design I chose in Illustrator. I chose the correct size I wanted it to be, and then took images to create my design. This is full design in Illustrator.
Next I took this design, and used the vinyl cutter, to cut out each small design individually so they could be in the required 4 different colors. I had the vinyl cutter cut each image like seen below, after uploading it to the machine from the computer.
The next step was to "weed" all of my vinyl pieces. This was just getting rid of the excess vinyl that I was not apart of my design, and that I don't what on my pants. The image on the right shows how all the designs look after "weeding".
This image is like a small preview of what the pants will look like. And it was also for me to line up my decals to see how they would look. I thought they looked good.
One of the last things to do was to simply use the heat press, to apply pressure to the vinyl decals and make them apart of the clothes. After holding down the heat press, and taking off the paper over the vinyl, the pants are complete with there new design. The Marco Island wording on the right of the pants, where was also put on the pants using a heat press of some sort. I didn't do this. This was already on the pants when I bought them.
And this is me quickly wearing the pants in the innovation center with the new design.
Conclusion
During this short unit I learned how to use a new machine, that is the heat press. I have never used a heat press before or even heard of one, but it was very easy and fun to use. It easy to see why this is a tool that is used in the clothing industry to make designs on clothes because its very easy to use. This unit also gave me a refresher on using the vinyl cutter. I didn't get to use this much during freshman year because of hybrid schooling. So it was good to use this machine again, and further familiarize, and expand my understanding with using it. Overall it was very cool to make my own design, and put it on my own clothing.