How To Customize A Placemat With Sublimation
If you can sublimate virtually any polyester-made item, why not sublimate a placemat?
Perhaps the placemats you use to set up your kitchen table are too dull for a particular occasion or season. Though if your mats happen to be made with 100-percent polyester, this opens up an opportunity for customization.
We’ll be demonstrating how this white round polyester placemat can be customized through sublimation. But with its 14" size in mind, we’ll also need to use a larger sublimation printer to accommodate, such as the Sawgrass SG1000. While its largest media width is 13 inches through the bypass tray, this will still be enough to bring a decently sized circular design over to the placemat. As soon as your design is ready, you may print it through your sublimation printer. For Sawgrass printers like the SG1000, send it to Sawgrass Print Manager and set the following settings: Substrate set to Polyester, Paper set to your paper’s profile, Source set to Bypass Tray, leave Mirror checked, and change the Color Mode in the Color tab to Photographic or Vivid depending on your design’s level of detail. With all these set, you may click Print on SPM.
Now that the design has been printed, it’s now ready to be applied onto a placemat! Turn on your heat press and set it to the same settings for a polyester tee, which will be 50 seconds at 385 degrees Fahrenheit with medium pressure. Depending on how your polyester placemat has been built, you may also need to use a pressing pillow to provide consistent pressure across the entire item and transfer.
Once the machine reaches temperature, cover the lower platen with a sheet of parchment paper, then add your transfer on top with the printed side up. Next, bring your placemat above the transfer and be sure to position it to its center. Folding the placemat in half can help make aligning it to the center point much easier. To keep the transfer in place, you may use strips of heat tape or adhesive spray to attach it onto the placemat. Once it’s been attached, flip the placemat with the paper side up, cover it with another parchment paper sheet and press.
After 50 seconds, open your machine and allow the transfer a brief moment to cool down. Once cooled, quickly peel it off the placemat and it’s now been customized with your own colorful design!
If you’re interested in sharing your custom placemats or other similar crafts with us, alongside with a growing community of heat transfer enthusiasts, you can join our HeatPressNation Creators Facebook group at heat.press/FBgroup. To learn more about sublimation tools and supplies, be sure to visit our website at HeatPressNation.com.
