Secret to Preventing Smeared Ink on Silhouette Printable Clear Sticker Paper

Yesterday I shared a tutorial on how to make custom stickers with the Silhouette Printable Clear Sticker Paper.  As a recap, I printed some simple black one line stickers. Sadly, while printing, the ink smudged all over making most of them unusable. Wah Wah Wah  I promised I'd share  the secret to preventing the ink bleeding and so here it is...

I did some testing and there's good news: I figured out how to prevent the ink from smearing when making clear stickers.

On my first test, I tested whether the smudging happened on certain color inks, filled fonts, outline-only fonts, small text, large text...pretty much everything smudged (again). (Here's me beginning to wonder why this paper has a 4/5 star rating on Amazon...)

Still not willing to give up, I thought maybe it was a printer problem, and not a sticker paper issue.  Right before printing, I went into my printer settings to change some things. The window or menu is going to vary printer to printer, but what you're looking for is the printer preferences or print set up.
(For me I hit the printer icon in Silhouette Studio > "Show Details" on the printer pop up window.)

For the best smudge-free results, you want to change two things: 

• Print quality 
• Material

It sounds odd, but you want the print quality on either low or draft (mine is typically on 'normal').  When you do this you are telling the printer not to use so much ink. Less ink means a lower change the ink will smudge because the smears happen when the ink pools. Unlike on paper, the clear plastic sticker paper can't absorb the link quickly enough which causes the smears as it goes through the printer.

Changing the material from paper to transparency also helps to reduce the chance of smudging.

Look what happened when I sent through the clear sticker paper this time....very minimal smudging!

I did get a tiny bit of smearing on the 'b' but no where near what I had on either of the previous two prints.

So the secret to preventing smeared ink on Silhouette Printable Clear Sticker paper is to use less ink while printing. 

Note: This post may contain affiliate links. By clicking on them and purchasing products through my links, I receive a small commission. That's what helps fund Silhouette School so I can keep buying new Silhouette-related products to show you how to get the most out of your machine! 

Thanks for coming to class today at Silhouette School.  If you like what you see, I'd love for you to pin it!

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