Tips For Using Patterned Heat Transfer Vinyl & Christmas Shape SVGs

3K Shares

There are so many cool types of vinyl you can use with your Cricut or Silhouette. You can check out some gorgeous options here in my Ultimate Cricut Crafters Gift Guide. Glitter has to be one of my favorite types of heat transfer vinyl, along with anything iridescent! 😍

And I’ve recently fallen in love with patterned HTV. But I learned (the hard way) that you need to treat it differently than regular HTV. Here’s how to use it and what I’ve learned.

This post contains affiliate links, which allow me to receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you make a purchase. All opinions are authentic and my own.

Patterned HTV can be just the thing for holidays and special occasions.

I made this ⬇ Halloween shirt with an awesome skull pattern HTV.

And I used this ⬇ gorgeous Lilly Pulitzer inspired print to make a Disney shirt as a gift for a friend.

I got both of these ⬆ patterns through Etsy shops. Amazon also has a lot of good options.

And when I found this buffalo plaid patterned HTV ⬇ I knew I had to use it to make some things for Christmas!

Cutting It

The first major difference in dealing with patterned HTV is that you mostly treat it like adhesive vinyl. To start, you put it on your mat pattern side up. And you do not mirror the design. Essentially, you’re cutting as you would adhesive vinyl.

Weeding It

You weed your design the way you would weed any design, taking off all the material around the design, leaving the image you want to see on your final product. The only difference is that you’ll weed from the front of the design, not the back.

Applying ‘Transfer Tape’

This is another step that is a lot like working with adhesive vinyl. You will need to put a transfer tape of sorts on top of the image. But you don’t want to use regular transfer tape here, use Easy Mask, which is specifically designed for heat transfer.

You can buy some here at Amazon. Some websites that sell patterned vinyl will likely also sell the Easy Mask or automatically include it with your patterned HTV order.

Remove Backing

To finish prepping your design, pull off the backing.

Press Design

Now that you’ve applied your Easy Mask to the front of your design and removed the backing, you have a sheet that looks and acts just like regular HTV that can be pressed onto your shirt, bag, towel, etc.

I apply my teflon sheet on top of the design, press at 300 degrees for 10 seconds, remove Easy Mask and press again with teflon sheet for another 10 seconds.