What is Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV)?
Heat Transfer Vinyl, or “HTV” as it’s commonly known in the industry, consists of a heat applied glue that isn’t activated until you apply heat to the product. To use this product, you reverse cut HTV and then using either an Iron, or the perfect type of Heat Press, you bond your HTV to a garment or other heat resistant product.
HTV requires the use of a vinyl cutter, such as the Silhouette Cameo, Brother Scan and Cut or Cricut cutting machines. These are the kind of machines you need to create your designs and they are applied to your choice of garment during the heating process.
HTV is available in a huge choice of colours and designs, so you can experiment and create unique designs using leopard print, glitter, metallic or neon.
Unlike adhesive vinyl, HTV is ideal for use on clothing or fabric. HTV is the best choice of vinyl product if you plan to print:
- Personalised T-shirts
- Personalised Babywear or Kid’s Clothing
- Personalised Dance Costumes
- Personalised Jeans
- Personalised Hoodies or Jumpers
- Personalised Backpacks
- Personalised Sports Uniforms
- Personalised Hats
- …and as you can imagine, much more!
While some people use HTV on bottles and mugs, we do not recommend this. Why? HTV simply doesn’t bond as well to these hard plastic or ceramic style products as it does to fabric.
Most HTV can be applied to fabrics that are able to withstand heat such as cotton, lycra, denim, leather, PU leather, polyester and satin. Some HTV vinyls have unique requirements to keep an eye out for, such as our Vivid Flex HTV, which is not able to be readily applied to nylon fabric, but there are other brands of HTV available that can be used for this purpose.
Some simple care tips for completed HTV printed items:
- We recommend cold water washing
- The garment can be dried in a dryer
- We recommend ironing your garment inside-out
- Do not apply heat to the finished printed area (it may warp your wonderful design!)
FREE Vinyl Swatch for Creativity at Home
Request your free vinyl colour swatches from us today. The swatches will include all of our adhesive vinyl range as well as heat transfer vinyls. Simply visit our Vinyl Swatch Request Form, fill out your details and we will pop one in the post for you.
