2022 Cricut Screen Printing Multiple Colors Explained

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the Maker's Gonna Learn YouTube channel. My name is Lauren and I am a craft producer here at Maker's Gonna Learn and today we are going to be teaching you how to screen print using your Cricut with multiple colors of ink. Now this is something that you're going to need to stick with me for the whole thing to make sure that you get all of the steps because it can get tricky at parts but we are going to be making this adorable shirt by the end of this video. Now the cut file that we're going to be using today is a Maker's Gonna Learn exclusive cut file. If you are new to our channel we are obviously a craft education YouTube channel but we also have a membership site where we bring you education, motivation, and inspiration to use your Cricut. We have thousands of cut files and hundreds of fonts and we release new cut files every month straight to you. Now we're going to just hop on into our project and we're going to go overhead so I can show you all of the materials that you're going to need to get started. The materials that you're going to need today is a t-shirt. I'm using a comfort color 100% cotton t-shirt. With screen printing you don't really have to worry about your fabrics. It can work on a poly blend t-shirt, a cotton t-shirt, really it doesn't matter. You have your personal preference for this so you will need a t-shirt blank. Next we're going to need permanent vinyl which is going to be our stencil. We're also going to need transfer tape for this as well. Next we have our different screen print inks. We have three different colors here. I really like the speedball inks. The speedball didn't have this color specifically so this is the jacquard professional quality. I was very impressed with this. I really do like this but so we're using two different brands but I really like both of these. Painter's tape is going to be a must with this project. You will heavily rely on your painter's tape. Underneath all of this we have our screen for screen printing and I do have the screen print fabric on it. Now this is something that you can buy if you are a beginner with screen printing. I suggest you buy a pre-made screen. Speedball has really great screens. This is one that I made. If you are a makers gonna learn member we actually have a master class teaching you how to make frames so we made this frame and we bought the screen print fabric on Amazon and all I have done is I've sapled that to this frame so this is you can make your own frames or you can buy pre-made frames. Next we have a piece of cardstock paper and this is really going to come in handy with you user registration marks for your different colors and you will see why I chose a very bright color later on in the video. Of course I have my light grip mat this is going to be for cutting our vinyl. Next we have our heat gun. Now this is not something that is necessary. You can let the screen print ink dry on its own however we're going to be working pretty fast and need to for it to dry pretty fast so we're going to be using a heat gun today. You also may want to grab a spoon. I use this. I use just a plastic spoon to spoon out the screen print inks from their containers onto my screen so you may want to grab a spoon. You can use a regular spoon. I just use a plastic spoon that way once I'm done I can toss it and throw it away. And then finally you are going to need a squeegee. Now this is probably one of the more important parts of this is having a specific screen print squeegee. There are different brands that you can buy. Obviously you can see ours is well loved and well used so you can wash these and reuse them very very often. Now that we've gone over all of our materials we're going to head over into design space and I'm going to walk you step by step through the process of setting up this cut file to get it ready to screen print with multiple colors. Now that we're over here in design space as you can see I already have this file ready to go but I'm going to walk you through the process of how to get it here. Now when I separate these files out you can see that all of these different colors are separate pieces. So I have my white, I have my pink and then I have my teal. Now what we're going to do is we're going to hop over to makersgonnalearn.com. Now if you are not a member you can sign up for our membership for as low as $20 a month and get commercial access to all of these files but we are going to be using this file today. All you have to do you don't even have to click and open up this file. If you'll just hit this little cloud icon with the arrow pointing down it is going to download to your computer. We are going to hop back over to Cricut design space. From there you will go to the upload button. You can upload image. Now you can drag or drop into this section or you can hit browse. Now I'm going to go to downloads because it's going to be in recent downloads and then I'm going to open up the little bit of dolly and I want the SVG version and I'm going to open that onto my computer. Once it has opened uploaded into design space you are going to select it and add it to your canvas. Now before we do this I'm going to go over here and I'm going to hide all of these. I'm not going to delete them out I'm just going to hide them all and we're going to bring this back in. First thing you want to do before adding the registration marks you are going to want to size your design as big as you want for your t-shirt. So we're going to hop overhead and we're going to look at our t-shirt and kind of measure how big we want. Now this is I did buy a larger t-shirt because I did want an oversized look so you can go a little bigger on your t-shirts. So I'm actually going to go as big as as big with the width as the Cricut is going to allow me. Now remember we're going to have registration marks as well so I'll probably size our picture to about 11 and that will give me a half of an inch to work with with our registration marks. So back over in design space I'm going to change my width to 11. Now it will stay locked and then that will keep it locked and size it down to 11 inches in width. Once we have this size to where we want it we are going to add our registration marks. Now this is important that we add our registration marks now because if we don't and we go to contour it's going to change the size of all of this. So I'm going to add in my little square. Now I want I don't want a two inch square so I'm going to put it down to 0.5 of a I'm going to do a half of an inch. Actually I think I might we'll try it with a half of an inch first. So now that I have a half of an inch square I'm going to put that there and then I'm going to duplicate that three times. So I'm going to move this one to this corner. We're going to try to get them as even as possible. So this one needs to come down just a little bit and what you can do is you can select this one and select this one and we can align them center vertically so they are on the same plane. Then I'm going to move this one down here and I'm going to move this one over here to this corner. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this one and this one. You can tell that they're off so we're going to align them center horizontally and then I'm going to align these two center horizontally. But now I also want to align these two on the bottom. We're going to select them both and then we're going to align them center vertically. So now we have our registration marks. Once that is done I'm going to select all of this and make sure it is still within our 11.5. So it is and I actually have some room to work with. So I'm going to maybe move these out away from it just a little bit so it might be a little easier to work with. We'll move this one out just a hair and move this one out just a hair. Okay so now we're over. This is the tricky part is moving your registration marks. Now if you want to work with a 12 by 24 inch mat it's possible to do that. No problem. Okay we are within the 11.5. Now that we have our registration marks and they are all within the 11.5 because I really just want to work with 12 by 12. You can work with the 12 by 24. That is totally up to you. Not a problem but we're just wanting to keep it within the 11.5 on both the height and the width. We are going to weld all of this together. So now we have a welded file with our registration marks there. Now what you're going to do I'm going to zoom out. We are going to select this and we are going to duplicate it two other times. So now we're going to start working with our colors. So first we have white. I'm going to have white. All of the words that are not Dolly or Miranda are going to be white. I want Dolly to be hot pink and I want the word Miranda to be teal. Now what we're going to do is we are going to select our white. We're going to come in here and contour. Now I want Dolly and Miranda and little line underneath Miranda I want it gone. So I'm going to contour this out along with the line underneath and then I'm going to come over here and just contour out all of the little holes inside these names. Okay once that is done you can see our cut file stayed the same size because we had these registration marks in place. Now we're going to do the same thing except I want to contour everything out except for the name Dolly. So we're going to hit contour. With this one it's going to be easier to say hide all contours. You can see the end of Miranda is the only thing left. We're going to bring our registration marks back and we are going to bring the word Dolly back as well and contour out Miranda. So I want everything inside the word Dolly there as well and I think we have it. So as you can see I forgot to contour out these so I'm going to go back to contour and contour out inside the name Miranda and there we go. Same thing for this one. We want everything out except for the name Miranda. We're going to go over here to contour. We are going to hide all contours. This is still the same as before. We're going to we want to leave these inside the letter inside the word Miranda. We want the I back and then we want the M and we also want our registration marks. Make sure you do not contour out your registration marks. Okay, so now we have a little bit of in white, Dolly in pink, and a whole lot of in white and Miranda in blue. So now we're going to select all of these. We are going to go to align and we are going to center them. We want them all centered and then it all comes together in perfect harmony. This makes my heart happy seeing how this goes together and works together and then from here you should be ready to cut. Now one thing I want to show you guys and we're going to go back to design space here in just a second. You can do three different screens for this. If you have multiple screens laying around that is great. However, I want to show you guys a little hack and a trick so that we're only using two screens but still using three colors. So back in design space, yes we have this set up with Dolly and Miranda separate and this is going to be white and I did this the very first time I did this. I did this with three different screens and it worked out great. However, this hack that I'm going to show you is we are going to align these center again. If you can see Dolly and Miranda are pretty separate like it's not they're not touching. It's not like this part of the file where things are get pretty close. These two are not touching so technically you can use one screen and all you would have to do is tape off the word Miranda. When you screen print the pink Dolly you would wash your screen and then dry it off and then you can tape off Dolly and screen print Miranda and I'm going to show you guys how to do that. So because of that I'm going to go ahead and weld these two together so that I only have one cut. Obviously it changes it all to that teal color. We know that Dolly is going to be pink but it's fine. It'll work out. So once you have that ready we are going to go to make it. You can cut this on a Cricut maker machine or an Explore. This is neither one of those work fine because we are just going to be using our fine point blade today. This next step is very very important so you need to make sure that you mirror both designs. Now this seems kind of odd because we're working with permanent vinyl. We are not working with HTV so we are working with permanent vinyl. However I want to go overhead and I want to show you guys how this is going to be assembled. So you're always going to want to work with your screen with the wood part obviously facing up because you want that screen print fabric closest to your fabric. So how this works is we're going to put the permanent vinyl on the back of this screen. It does not go on the inside of the screen. The reason it doesn't go on the inside of the screen is because when you go to squeegee you have a chance of snagging your vinyl and messing up your design. So our vinyl is going to go on the back of this screen and the reason we mirror it is because we put it on it's going to be mirrored and then when we flip it back over it's going to be on the right side. So yes it is odd to have to mirror your permanent vinyl but for this project make sure you mirror your vinyl. Once you have both mats turned on the mirror on you're going to click continue. You are going to click continue. We're going to connect to our maker and we are going to set our base material to premium vinyl removable mat. Now this is where you would normally add your vinyl to your mat and cut your vinyl. I personally have already cut the vinyl for this project. I feel like you all know how to cut the vinyl so we're not going to go over that. When you weed your vinyl you are weeding out the spots that you want color. So this is kind of like when you're making a stencil. We are making a stencil with our vinyl. So first off we're going to do our white. As you can see I already have it all weeded out. I have my transfer tape over top of it and we're going to go overhead and I'm going to show you guys how you're going to want to put this on your screen. We are going to remove our vinyl from its backing. Now this may be something you need to make sure that there aren't little pieces of the vinyl that get left behind. Here we have a piece of a bee that's wanting to stay on there. Now that we have our vinyl removed from the backing we are going to place this onto our screen. Now my suggestion with this is because we want to try our best to keep our screen as tight as possible. Lay that on there and then flip it over this way and we're going to burnish it down from the front. And you can tell you can see where it's getting attached to that screen. Once you have it burnished down we're going to flip it back over and we are going to take our transfer tape off. Now do not throw the piece of transfer tape away that you use for this. See it's trying to get my A. There we go. Because you can reuse this for the next time you use this screen. So we're going to turn it flip it back over and we're going to just make sure it's down really well. Now you do not have to use a piece of vinyl that almost covers the whole screen. It just so happened that this is a 12 by 12 frame so it almost covers it all. If you just use half of the frame do not worry. What we're going to do next is we're going to cover up these areas over here like these edges with painter's tape. But you do not want to cover up your registration marks because that's going to be key when you are lining up the other pieces. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take my painter's tape and I'm going to look for the edges that are not covered in vinyl and I'm going to cover these up. And you can also turn it around on the back and make sure that see we've got this it's covered with that blue painter's tape. So I need it up this side and along the edges. And I'm probably going to do just a little bit on this side on the inside just to make sure that it doesn't get through the paint does not get through there. I don't think I'll be that far on the edge but it's better to be safe than sorry. One thing that you need to make sure a little hack for this when you are getting pretty close to those registration marks if you'll lay your tape kind of there you see it's kind of covering it up but what I want to do is I just want to come in here and put it down with my fingers up there against that edge to make sure it covers that and then we can lay it down on the top. And even if you think that's a little too close for your comfort that registration mark make sure you leave it open but we'll just come back through here on the middle just to make sure we don't get any extra right through there. And then we're just going to continue the process of taping the edges. And just to be on the safe side I'm just going to add a little bit of tape to this side as well. Tear that off. Okay now that we have all of that taped your next step is you are going to line your design up where you want it to go and then we are going to come in with our cardstock and I'm just going to cut this into little squares. So what I'm going to do now and you'll as you can see it's kind of hard when you're working with dark colors to see this super good. Same thing if you use white. If I were to use white permanent vinyl on the back of this because I'm screen printing in white it's going to be hard to line these up because they're white so that's why I use a bright very different color. So once I have that lined up I'm going to pick up my screen until I see the green in that corner trying not to move it just kind of pushing my paper in there until I see the green. Same for this just pushing it in there until I see the green and for this corner. Now what I'm going to do I'm going to tape off these pieces of cardstock without trying to move the shirt too much. That's why you want your pieces you can use index cards for this we just have an abundance of cardstock laying around the office so that's why I'm using the cardstock. I'm actually going to tape that one up there off on that top as well and I'm going to take this up. So now we are ready to start the process of screen printing. So we are going to be starting with our white color. Now because I have a lot more room down here on the bottom I'm actually going to put the white down here instead of up top. So I'm going to take my plastic spoon and I'm just going to take my ink and I'm going to run it across the bottom. Now you don't want to use an excessive amount of ink however you want to make sure it gets really good and covered and plus what I like to do once I'm done when there is extra ink I will take my spoon I will just scoop it up and put it back in my container. So this next step is going to be what I have learned is pretty key. So I'm just going to which this because we don't have the registration marks filled right now it really doesn't matter but I'm just going to pull this up and I'm going to back fill my screen. So I'm just going to come through here and I'm going to back fill my screen. Now I'm going to lay this back down and I'm going to take this and I'm going to drag it down. Now you want to make sure you get your registration marks as well with this. So you're going to drag down I'm just going to grab that registration mark so that it has some ink on it and we're going to go over this a couple times. Now you want to put some decent pressure on this when you do this that way it really does get through the screen and gets onto your material. Take this and move it back around and I think I'm going to just drag it one more time up and back down. As you can see I have quite a bit of ink left. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to take my spoon and I'm going to drag it back into my container. I have a little bit of excess over here on the edges that I'll just pick up. Move this out of the way and there is the first part of our shirt. Now what is going to be key is you are going to need to go wash your screen immediately. So I'm going to run out to our sink and I'm going to wash our screen and be right back. Now that I have my screen washed before I move into my next step I'm going to take my heat gun and I'm going to turn it on low and I'm just going to run it over this screen print ink so that it dries very quick. Once it is dry to the point where you can touch it and nothing comes off on your finger you are good to go to add your next layer. That one was not dry as good. There we go. Now I'm going to move my shirt over to the side and we're going to repeat the process of adding vinyl to a screen. Now as you can tell I have used this screen. I used it to do a 4th of July shirt and you can reuse the screens once you have used them but we're going to add our vinyl to this other screen. So I'm just burnishing this transfer tape down so that it will pick up this vinyl and we can add it to the back of that screen. Once we have the backing off of our vinyl same thing we are going to lay it down and then flip it over so that our design stays on our screen. And this is why I say reuse the same transfer tape because it seems to not peel up our vinyl. It's a lot easier taking it off the vinyl than the previous one was. So now once again we are going to tape off and I'm going to pull the shirt back in frame. We are going to tape off so we're going to start with Dolly. So we're actually going to tape off Miranda first and the edges. So we're taping all of this off. We're going to come up here and tape this. Now you don't have to really tape as much around the edges with this specific portion for this design because I'm just going to be putting the screen print ink just right here around Dolly and then just dragging it around Dolly. I'm not going to put it in the registration marks because I don't need to add another layer. I could just see those white registration marks through there. So as long as you tape off really around the word Dolly then that will be good. You don't have to use so much tape and tape down in here because I'm not going to be dragging all the way down here. So with our pieces of paper staying in place, what we're going to do is we are going to line up all of our registration marks and then we are going to start dragging our paint. Once again, now this is where you're going to want to be careful. Just pick it up off the shirt. You're going to want to backfill your design. Then we're going to place it back down with our registration marks and then you're going to drag. Put the excess ink back into the container and we have our second color. Once again, you're going to want to go wash this immediately. So I'm going to run wash this out and then we're going to tape off the Dolly and drag the Miranda. Now that I have that screen cleaned and I am back in here, here is the good thing about this screen print. Before I dry it, if you can see this Y is a little lighter than I would like to, I'm going to grab a paintbrush and we're just going to touch that area up. So I'm just going to grab this paintbrush. We're going to get a little bit of this screen print ink and we're just going to fill it in to make it look just a little bit darker up through there. Okay, now that we've kind of touched up that little area, I'm going to come in with my heat gun and I'm going to dry this pink. Now one thing I do want to address is you can see that that pink is a little bit duller than this pink and I want to say what I did with this one specifically is I brought the Dolly back in and I drug it one more time. However, it does make it a little thicker and has more tendency to crack. So you can leave it like that or you can drag it one more time if you want the color to be a little brighter. But I think I like this faded out, little washed out look. So I'm just going to make sure it gets really good and dry. Now that that is dry, I'm going to bring in the screen that we just used for Dolly and I did wash this and you can reuse these screens. So if you wanted to make a screen and you wanted to keep using it, for example, if you make your screens you can keep these on hand if you are wanting to sell t-shirts, screen print t-shirts and all you have is your Cricut, you can keep these on hand and then anytime anybody wants a shirt like this, you can pull out your screens. That is possible. However, if you just want to make these for yourself, you can remove this vinyl on the back and put a different file on here and really screen print anything you want if it's just for personal use. But if you are doing mass production and you want to make more than one, I would definitely make a screen for each design that you have. Now that we've done that, I'm going to come in here. I'm going to pull up the tape off of Miranda. You do want to try to get this as dry as possible. If it were up to me, I would probably let this sit for a little bit, but it is fine if it's not. See where I taped this, where I taped Miranda off really good, you can see where it did not get wet. So we're just going to tape off Dolly and go with it. One thing I will say, do not use a heat gun to dry out your screen print fabric because what's going to happen is you're going to melt it completely. So don't do that. We learn from experience that that happens if you try to dry your screen print fabric. Best thing to do, sit it out in the sun and let it air dry. So now we have Dolly taped off. I do not like this edge right here. I'm afraid I'm going to get too close to it trying to get that A. So I am going to tape off this and it's okay that this little registration mark is partially covered up because I still have the other three and I can still use it. So now that we've got that, we are going to once again line up our registration marks and then we are going to start with our teal color. Same thing as before, we're going to run this color across where we're going to be screen printing. Fold it up just a little bit. Backfill where we're going to be screen printing. Now I'm seeing that I probably don't have enough ink right here so I'm just going to add some more right there on that edge and backfill and then line up our registration marks again. Press down and pull. Then we're going to take our extra ink, drag it from our squeegee into our container and I've got a little extra over here on the side that I'm going to get up and then pray to the crafting gods and pull up our design. Ta-da! And once again you're going to run to the sink and make sure you wash your screen. Same as before, once you have washed your screen we are going to make sure that our screen print ink dries very well. Now one thing I do want to add, I always thought that I was a speedball girl when it came to screen printing ink but I have been very very highly impressed with this Jacquard professional screen printing ink. I think that the lines came out super crisp, the color is phenomenal, it covered very well. I just, I highly, I really really like this Jacquard screen printing ink. And once that is dry you can remove your tags and you have a cute screen printed t-shirt. Now you can see I kind of got a little white over here. I'm just going to leave it, that's where I didn't put my my paper close enough to that edge so I did mess up a little bit but I'm just, I think it'll be okay. Wow that was a process. It can get messy as you guys can see but I absolutely love the results of a good screen printed t-shirt. Now one thing I hope that you took away from this video is the use of those registration marks. This is not something that just has to be used with screen printing. You can learn to use registration marks when lining up vinyl with so many different other projects using your Cricut and I really hope that you have taken something away from this even if you don't plan to screen print a t-shirt. Maybe you've learned how to use registration marks for other projects that you plan on doing in the future. One thing I will say if screen printing intimidates you please don't let it. It has quickly become one of my favorite ways to make a t-shirt and I have been making so many different screen print t-shirts here lately. If you have enjoyed today's craft make sure you hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to our channel for all of the crafts that we will bring you and turn on that bell notification so that you can be notified every time we go live or post a new video. Thank you all so much for stopping by and I will see you all in the next one. Bye everyone!