Glitter Papers & T-shirt Vinyl on the eCraft

So in exploring the eCraft's capabilities, I would be remiss if I did not cut up some glitter papers.  All of these glitter papers cut really well.  They are all different thicknesses so the pressure settings vary.  I did find that as long as you are not cutting intricate shapes, you will do better to cut these without tabs.  I also found that it was better to cut all of these with the blade safety cap off.  I think that the glitter cuts better with that extra bit of blade clearance.  I tested out four different glitter papers.

Light green - top left - American Crafts, pressure 8, tab density 0, tab width 0, blade safety cap off
Red - top right - Doodlebug Design, pressure 5, tab density 0, tab width 0, blade safety cap off
Silver - bottom left - Paper Studio, pressure 5, tab density 0, tab width 0, blade safety cap off
Pink - bottom right - Colorbok, pressure 4, tab density 0, tab width 0, blade safety cap off

Next up, t-shirt vinyl (aka heat transfer vinyl).  I don't know the brand name of this vinyl, I got this from http://www.craftvinyl.com/. I did a couple of test cuts and this one was a little tricky.  The "backing" paper on this vinyl is actually a shiny piece of acrylic.  Whenever I fed it into the machine, it would slide all over the place.  I then determined that you need a cardstock stabilizer for it, but it would also slide all over the cardstock stabilizer.  The thing that finally worked with this is to use some removeable adhesive and adhere it to the cardstock stabilizer before trying to cut it.  This vinyl is thicker than a traditional vinyl so therefore I needed to use a pressure of 6 to get a kiss cut on this vinyl.  Of course I used no tabs on this.  This vinyl does cut extremely well, and weeded without a problem.  I absolutely love this product!

I decided to go ahead and make a project to show you using t-shirt vinyl.  I found this SVG in my stash, and imported it into eCP.  First I cut it out of cardstock to make sure that this file would cut correctly, which it did.  With t-shirt vinyl, you need to cut on the dull side and cut your image mirrored or flipped.  eCP does have an option to flip an image, and so I tried it out and it worked fine.  I cut both pieces, the background in gold, and the DAD in red.  I then placed the gold background on a sweatshirt of my husband's and placed a teflon sheet on top of it, and then ironed away.  This paticular t-shirt vinyl is a "cold peel" product which means that after you iron it, you need to let it cool down before peeling away the acrylic backing which acts like your transfer tape. I have found that it needs to cool for 3-5 minutes for best results.  If the vinyl does not stick to your t-shirt, iron it again.  Most likely this happens because your iron is not hot enough.  Once I had the gold background in place, I layered the red DAD piece on top and then ironed that piece into place.  Everything worked great, and I love how this looks.  My friend Desiree and I plan on doing a bunch of t-shirts for our kids, we just need to put together our order and plan out what exactly we want to do.