May. 21, 2021

How To Make A Baseball Dad T-Shirt - Free SVG Included

What’s not to love about eating hot dogs and getting a suntan while rooting on your favorite team? Baseball is widely recognized as America’s pastime. Who better to enjoy it with than your dad. I’ve teamed up with Pen and Posh to bring you this Baseball Dad t-shirt.

I’m using Pen and Posh’s free baseball dad svg design. Like usual, the file is set up for maximum versatility with each piece of the design being separate. This means I have the option to make everything a different color. I’m making the words white and the baseball stitching red since I’m applying this to a black shirt

Getting started, I group my design, lock the ratio aspect and then resize to ten inches wide. Using the rectangle tool I’m adding some registration marks to make it easier to line up the colors when I apply them to the shirt. Since this design is pretty simple, you can forgo the registration marks and just eyeball the placement. I’m making two copies of the marks so they match for each section of the cut file.

Since I’m using heat transfer vinyl, I have to mirror my work. I select everything on the screen and mirror to the right. Now I can delete the original and finish working with the mirror copy.

Now I’m adding a weeding box around each part of the design. The registration marks are within my weeding box. I make my weeding box as tight as possible around my design. This helps me not to waste extra vinyl and makes weeding a lot easier. Again, you can skip this step and just cut off the excess vinyl before weeding the design.

Now I’m un-grouping the design and selecting one set of registration marks, the weeding box and the words. I group these pieces together and put them aside. Again, I use the rectangle tool to make another weeding box to the stitching. I include the second set of registration marks inside this weeding box as well. I group all of these parts together as well.

Now I’m ready to get cutting. Over on the send panel, I select the basic cut which cuts out the registration marks, the weeding box and the stitching. For the heat transfer vinyl I’m using, I use the flocked htv setting. I get my machine plugged in and prepare my mat. When using heat transfer vinyl, the carrier sheet (shiny side) is the part that needs to be stuck to the mat. As I’m applying my vinyl to my mat I realized my design will not fit across the width of my vinyl sheet. I open the rotate panel and rotate my design to fit up and down the length of my vinyl sheet.

Cutting the white baseball dad, I first used the smooth htv setting and then the flocked htv setting. This made each letter cut completely out of the vinyl. Thankfully I learned my lesson and I’m doing a test cut on the red. I’m testing the flocked htv setting. To do the test cut I’m using the arrow keys to feed the vinyl through the cutting machine to the thin strip at the bottom. Now I’m hitting the test button and it is cutting out a square and a circle. Before I unload my material, I’m peeling up the corner to see if my cut settings worked. A good cut will peel up the square and leave the triangle behind. The flocked htv setting works perfectly.

Now that I have the correct cut settings, I’m going to cut out the red stitching with the weeding box and registration marks. Again, I rotated the design to fit on my sheet of vinyl. Looking at the size of my scrap of red htv, I realize I won’t be able to cut a weeding box and one of the registration marks won’t fit either. I delete those from the screen before hitting the send button.

To weed the red, I cut off the extra vinyl so it doesn’t go to waste. I peel away all the extra leaving just the stitching and one registration mark. I tell you, even the best of plans don’t always work out!

Since there isn’t any weeding to do for the white parts, I fire up my heat press and lint roll my shirt. I fold my shirt in half and give it a quick press to make a center crease. This makes it a lot easier to line everything up.

Now for making the best of what I got! I’m using the weeding box as a stencil and taping it down on the shirt. I lay all the letters inside the stencil where they belong. I carefully pull up the stencil and try not to move any of the letters. Since there is not any extra carrier sheet to keep the letters sticking to the shirt I am being very careful to lift and press the heat press on the shirt so nothing moves around.

The hard part is peeling off the carrier sheet from each letter. I use my weeding tool to get between the carrier sheet and the vinyl and lift the carrier sheet off. It takes me a while to do each letter, but it is better than wasting this sheet of vinyl.

I’m ready to add the red so I’m bringing the stencil back out and laying it around the words again. I’m lining up the red registration mark with the cut out for the other marks. Once it is lined up I can pull the stencil out and stick down the red with the carrier sheet.

I pull off the registration mark and then run the heat press over the red stitching. I pull up the carrier sheet and apply heat to the back of the shirt and once more to the front with a cloth protecting the vinyl.

It's a wrap! That my friend is how you make a baseball dad t-shirt with heat transfer vinyl, even when nothing cuts correctly. If you’re looking for something special to make dad, this might just be the ticket.

For more from Christie, check out her website, Crafty Christie’s Creations, she specializes in handmade greeting cards, and DIY paper crafts. She is an EXPERT in Silhouette Studio, which has also led her to start producing tutorials to make all this crafting a bit easier. Follow her on Instagram @craftychristiescreations for more fun craft projects and tips!