 Hi everyone, welcome back to a new video here on my channel. My name is Zyra and I post mainly art and drawing videos, but this one's going to be a little bit different but still creative, so if you'd like to watch more, be sure to check out my channel and subscribe. Today's video is all about creating t-shirt designs using Cricut Explore 3 and Cricut EasyPress. I also want to thank Cricut for sponsoring this video and without further ado, let's get started. In this video I will be showing you three ways to create cute custom t-shirts. The first method is using Cricut's very own design space app, which is available to download onto your computer, phone, or tablet once you purchase a Cricut cutting machine. But now what is Cricut? So if you haven't heard of Cricut already, Cricut is a brand of computer cutting machines for home crafters, DIYers, and artists. I've literally seen this brand on so many of my favorite artists and YouTubers, so if you haven't heard of this brand, that's crazy, it's everywhere. These machines can cut paper, felt, vinyl, fabric, and other special materials like leather and even wood. And not only can it cut, it can also draw, score, engrave so much more. There's a lot of things that these machines can do. And the best part is that Cricut doesn't only sell cutting machines, they continue to expand their range. So they also sell their very own materials and tools that you can use with the machine for whatever project you desire. But they also have other machines like the EasyPress, which makes t-shirt transfers so much easier. I was fortunately gifted multiple Cricut products, which as you can see in the video, they're just so overwhelming and I'm just so excited. I will be using these items for many more projects to come, that's for sure. So I have the Cricut Explore 3. This machine is compatible with so many different tools and I was given the pen tool, which I am yet to try out, but it also does come with a blade already in it, but you can replace that blade as well with other tools that they have. This machine cuts faster than its older version, which is really good. And the box also comes with sample materials, which are very helpful to get you started if you don't really know what you want to be creating just yet. I also have the Cricut EasyPress 2, which comes in multiple sizes, but I have the 9x9 inch perfect for medium-sized projects. Rather than using a regular iron, this has a larger surface area with the square shape that it has, which can evenly heat up your iron-on designs much faster and with better lasting results. And as I've mentioned before, we also have Cricut Design Space, which is the app that will help us operate our Cricut machines. So this app offers a wide range of projects that are available to get you inspired and to try. They also have so many images and fonts that are specific to the app that you can use to either create your very own designs or use as is for your own projects. So if you are interested in owning your very own Cricut machine or machines, I have their website linked in the description box, as well as the individual items used in this video. So please check them out. Alternatively, you can also purchase these products in-store. So if you live in Australia like I do, they are available at Harvey Norman, Big W, JB Hi-Fi, Costco, and my favorite, Spotlight. So go check them out. Back to the project. Basically, I just go into Design Space and then into Canvas to create a new project. So it looks like this. It has the same layout as their Cricut Mat. It has that grid, so it makes it nice and easy to know where you're placing your design and what size it is because they do have the ruler or the measurements on the top and on the side. There are also tabs next to the Canvas where you can access templates to help you out or projects, existing projects that you can try out, images that you might want to use as is or to help create your own design. You can also add text using your own font in your computer or Cricut fonts, and then you can add shapes or you can also upload your own design. Since I want this to be very simple, as in you can do this yourself as well and don't need a design background, I am just going to browse their selection of images, see what they have. I am currently on a free trial of the standard access just because the free trial was available. It gives me unlimited use of over 200,000 images and over 700 fonts. Plus, it also gives me 10% off any licensed images that I may want to purchase. So this is their price list. So when searching for an image, because like I said, I am on standard access, I can search so many images, you can literally just type in whatever word you want and look for images or designs that are available to use. So this gives me a lot more options than if I was just on a free version. I was eventually interested in creating a personalized shirt, mostly focusing on my zodiac sign, which is cancer. And I found this really cute design for my shirt. This design is going on the front. And basically, once I'm happy with that, you just add it to the canvas and resize it. To resize it, what I did was I placed a ruler on my shirt to see like what size I would like. And eventually I settled for a 10 centimeter height image. Now for another cute design on the back, I wanted a phrase to go with the zodiac sign. You can also filter your search to phrases and you can save the ones that you really like whilst you're browsing so that later on you can pick your favorite one and eventually go with that. So I was kind of tossing between two options. However, I eventually decided to custom make my own and this is the second method. We're still using Cricut Design Space, but we're going to use their fonts to create our very own design. So I settled for the words, this is the sign you're looking for, which I thought was short enough and it kind of matched the idea of zodiac sign. So you can choose whatever font you want, your own computer's fonts, they sync automatically into this app or you can use the Cricut Fonts, which is what I did. You can also change the letter and line spacing. And for my quote, I decided to kind of spice it up a little bit and add some images, which once again I went and searched for stars and I added like a star. I thought that one matched the design that was already on my canvas and then I also added some shapes, which are just basic circles to match the aesthetic of the first image. Once that is all done, I select the images and then I press weld, which then merges all the selected items and it turns it into a basic cut shape. This means that the design is now ready to be cut directly onto the material that we have. However, make sure to mirror your image as well, which I didn't do, but thankfully there's a reminder to mirror your image just before you cut on an iron on material. So thank you Design Space for giving me that reminder or else this would have not gone well. The material I have is the Smart Iron On, which was kindly sent to me by Cricut and I chose the yellow one from the pile that they gave me since I already have a red t-shirt and I thought the yellow would really stand out from the red. I thought that would be a cool color combination. So that's what I picked. A smart material pretty much means that you don't need a cutting mat, which is perfect. If you asked me, I was so happy once I found out what the difference between a smart material was and just like an everyday iron on material. So once I'm ready to cut the designs, I simply press make it and I follow the instructions on screen. This means choosing the right material name on their list and they have a bunch of things on their list. You could also choose the right pressure. However, I just left mine at default and then you load the machine with the material and start cutting. And just a quick note, Design Space actually told me how much material I would need and I had the option whether to cut that exact material size from the roll of vinyl, but instead I decided to just load the entire roll onto the cutting machine because I just feel like that may waste less materials. But once that is all done, we just pretty much sit and wait. And cutting doesn't actually take a while, which is really good. And it was also really interesting to just watch the machine do its thing. So I actually just sat there watching the machine do the cutting. But after that's finished, we now have to remove the extra vinyl that's not part of our design. And that's when weeding tools come in handy. Patience is also very key, especially with a small design like mine. I just, I didn't anticipate that the small dots would make weeding hard. Like I should have known looking at it at the very start, but I just totally forgot about it. It's just that they're really small shapes, so they don't stick very well to the liner. They prefer to stick with the vinyl, which is why you have to be really slow with this. Take your time. Eventually, I found a good trick to keep the dots in place, kind of pressing them back onto the liner with my fingers really helped to keep them in place. Unfortunately, they did still shift a bit. So just be careful when creating a design that has really small elements. But don't worry, this is all still beginner friendly. This is my first time using Cricut or cutting on vinyl. So I'm also a beginner. But once that is all done and you have it looking beautiful, it is time to press it onto the t-shirt. And of course, I will be using the Cricut EasyPress and the EasyPress Matte, which makes transferring iron on vinyls so much easier. It basically does everything for you. And there are also settings that you can choose depending on your fabric, which is on their website. It's super helpful. You can choose what machine you're using, what fabric you have, and it will tell you the temperature and the time that is needed for that project. So you can then increase the temperature and you can set a timer on the machine. I chose 145 degree Celsius and did a timer for 30 seconds. So then the machine will be warming up. And as it's doing that, you can take that time to set up the mat and then the t-shirt, making sure that there's no lint or creases. And then once the machine is hot enough and it does reach that temperature pretty quickly, it will beep. And that's when you can use it to press the shirt so that it's nice and flat and that is your prep. So the shirt that I'm using is a cotton polyester blend and it reacts really weirdly to the heat, causing the collar to darken. This isn't something to worry about since once it cools down, the collar goes back to normal. But just in case you might be wondering what is happening, it's not the machine. It's the shirt that I'm using. And for this step, simply place your design on the t-shirt, making sure that it's nice and straight, then press it down with the easy press. So you click the cricket button to set off the timer and you simply wait for the beep. Once that is done, you can flip the shirt and then press the other side for 15 seconds. And then you're done. So from there, you can just slowly peel the liner away and you've created your very own t-shirt design. Well, I've created my very own t-shirt design, but you can do the same exact thing. So I pretty much just repeat the same steps on the back of the shirt with the other design that I created. And now I have my very own zodiac sign t-shirt. And this is definitely a very useful tool to have. So if you want to make your own clothes just for yourself or if you want to use it for business or if you want to gift custom t-shirts to your friends, this is such a useful machine to have. Speaking of gifting custom t-shirts, here's the third method of creating custom t-shirts. I would say that this is slightly more advanced in terms of design because I'm literally creating a custom logo slash t-shirt design from scratch for a commission. This is for work. My partner and his manager decided to gift their co-workers a custom t-shirt with an inside joke of the design and they asked me to create the design and to print the t-shirts. So I created my design on Illustrator as that is what I use for work as a graphic designer. However, I am 100% positive that you can recreate this on design space as well. It'll be challenging and the commands will be completely different but I feel like it's still doable. Now the concept of the design was to say national handball team since it's an inside joke where like one co-worker is given a task and they just handball that task to another co-worker and I feel like this is kind of their culture at work. Since handball is an actual sport I wanted to make this look like it's an actual team's logo. After all that also still plays on the idea that they are gifting these shirts to their team at work. So yeah it kind of makes sense and I also wasn't given a proper brief for this so I just went bananas with the design and yeah this is kind of what I ended up with. I wanted it to be wearable by everyone and hopefully in their everyday lives. Whether I achieved that or not who is to say but once I sent this over to my partner and his manager they were happy with it so I decided to print it on a t-shirt as like a sample slash test. Similar to the previous t-shirt I just made I will also be using design space. I just kind of wanted to show you a brief glimpse at my process on creating that design. So instead of the first and second method that I showed you where we used already existing images or creating our own design on the app using the already existing fonts and images I am going to upload my design as a PNG onto the app. So these next couple of steps are still beginner friendly so if you've got a design of your own that already exists like I said before simply press the upload button and upload your file. You also have the option to choose what kind of image you're uploading. They're simple moderately complex or complex. From all the tutorials I've watched on how to use the Cricut machine basically all they say is that if you're not sure on whether your design is moderate or complex always just click complex. You can then have the option to edit your image especially if it has a background you can manually or automatically remove it which are pretty good tools but since mine doesn't have a background I just skip that part. You can also upload multiple images at once and then select all of them at the very end to add into your canvas all at the same time but for me I only have one image to select as I'm only printing one but that is it. It is now on the canvas and you can make adjustments to it such as changing the size and of course mirroring the image. After all of that is done click make it and simply follow the instructions. For the material I am also using the smart iron on but this time I'm using it in white since the shirt that I'm using is black I just thought it would be a nice contrast and this time instead of using the entire roll I decided to cut the material down to the size that was recommended by DesignSpace. After doing this test I actually don't recommend doing this at all especially because my design isn't that big so if yours is the same then that means the material that you're cutting is short therefore the machine kind of struggles to keep it in place resulting in rough cuts. Now it's not completely horrible it still does a pretty good job but it's just not as smooth as the previous method that I've done it's not as smooth as the previous shirt that I've created so even though I'm not super happy with this one I'm glad that I tried this method out so obviously now I know which one is better and which one gives me a better result. I repeated the same steps when cutting and pressing the design and after all of that I finally now have two custom t-shirts so I showed the one that I just created to my partner and his manager and thankfully they liked it so now I just have to make 16 t-shirts with this design before Christmas so wish me luck I definitely will not be able to do this without Cricut so once again if you are interested in checking out Cricut having your very own Cricut cutting machine as well as your very own easy press then go ahead and open the description box to all the Cricut goodies like their website Instagram and Facebook and if you'd like to watch more Cricut videos let me know my next challenge is to make my very own stickers with my own art in them so that'll be hopefully a new video in the future with that said I will end today's video and I hope you liked it as well as the three different methods on how to create your very own t-shirt design with Cricut please give this video a like and subscribe share this video to fellow artists and crafters as well thank you so much for watching I wish you the best of luck with your creative journey and I will see you in my next video