Custom Vinyl Cutting
We started screen printing in 2006, and then in 2009 got interested in vinyl cutting and bought a top of the line cutter and a nice heat press and rolls of vinyl and all the little tools necessary to get into the craft. It's radically different than screen printing, as there are no inks or screens. The vinyl comes on rolls and we feed it through the cutter (a Roland GX-24) and the machine moves the vinyl back and forth as the blade moves back and forth, cutting the vinyl. Then we take the cut vinyl and lay it out on a table and begin "weeding," which means we use a tool to pick out all the negative from the design, everything that isn't supposed to be there. There are a couple types of vinyl, basically: shirt vinyl and sign vinyl. If it's shirt vinyl, then after it's weeded it is applied to the garment with a heat press. If it's sign vinyl, then after weeding application tape is put on the vinyl so that it can be mailed out to be put on a surface by a customer. It's a pretty cool process.
Well, what is vinyl good for with shirts? Unique shirt prints, for one. Screen printing is great for repetition, if you need 10 or 1000 shirts that are exactly the same, but it stinks for making just one shirt. So if someone wants one simple shirt, we can use vinyl for it, or if we are doing an order of softball/team shirts, we'll definitely use vinyl for the names and numbers on the backs of the shirts. It looks good. And vinyl is a great way for us to custom print polo shirts, since we do not do embroidery.
- Other things we can do with vinyl:
- Wall Art - Large die-cut vinyl stickers to adorn walls, either custom or pre-designed
- Custom Banners - We do smaller banners with vinyl in one color, and larger banners with full color, digital printing
- Decals of all sorts - Decals for vehicles, windows, doors, laptops and so on
To cut the vinyl, we need vector artwork, so basically something created in Illustrator. We can take high quality artwork and vectorize it ourselves. The vinyl cutting machine needs vector and follows the lines to cut the vinyl. Email us or call us at 215-514-7643 if you have questions or are interested in ordering.