How to Cut, Weed and Press (Glitter) HTV Without the Carrier Sheet

Did you ever have a scrap piece of HTV that's large enough to cut but no longer has the carrier sheet? Or maybe you got a little ahead of yourself in your excitement about your shirt (glitter HTV will do that to ya) and pulled off the HTV immediately after cutting! 

Silhouette School contributors Becky and Glenna from My Paper Craze are here today to explain a simple trick so you can actually salvage some of those poor pieces of HTV even without the carrier sheet!

Becky here!! Did you ever need to re-cut one small section of an HTV design, but you have no more of that HTV left other than a pile of scraps and trash? Well, today I'm going to show you how you can turn your pile of HTV scraps into the solution! 

One thing you need to keep in mind is this method will only work with glitter HTV (or other stiff HTV such as reflective). Smooth (regular) HTV stretches as it is removed from the backing (and would stretch again removing it from the cutting mat), therefore we do not recommend attempting this with smooth HTV. 

The first thing you want to do is trim down your scrap piece a bit as you can see I did here.

Now normally I'd cut this glitter HTV from the back and with the shiny carrier side down, but that's long gone. But what settings would I cut it on?   I finally concluded that the material is the same thickness since I wouldn't normally cut through the backing anyways, so I cut the glitter HTV on the same normal settings for Flocked Heat Transfer Material in the Silhouette Studio software - only this time I cut with the glitter side up.  I manually put the blade on 3, since that is what the software recommended. Let's try it out with a test cut.

Worked like a charm! And let me tell ya, I never have this kind of luck, so I was quite enthused. So, I reloaded the mat into the Silhouette and cut the full design. †Luckily, right before it cut, I thought of one main difference...

DO NOT MIRROR THE CUT DESIGN!

Why? †Because you are cutting the material right-side up. †I guess technically you could still put your material glitter side down, but I don't think you would get as good of a stick to the cutting mat with the glitter. So we're going to break the rules and cut our HTV without mirroring AND with the glitter side up. 

After it cuts, you do have to be a little more careful with the weeding since the mat isn't quite as sticky as the backing would be. SLOWLY pull up a corner of the HTV and weed it away from the design, which should still be adhered to your cutting mat.

So it looks like it worked quite well.  This is the part that has a little bit of good news and a little bit of bad news. 

Good news first: the cut worked like a charm and I was ultimately able to finish my project! 

The bad news is, you do have to place your cut HTV by hand. My first instinct was to try to re-adhere the HTV to the backing. I recovered a clean carrier sheet that I had recently used and layered it on top of my cut HTV on the cutting mat. The problem is, no matter how much I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed the backing onto the HTV it only seemed to make the HTV stick even more to the mat.

So I eventually gave up and peeled the letters off by hand. This worked for me because my writing was a beautiful (and thicker) cursive font that was welded together, but I could easily see where this would be a pain for individual letters.

At this point I had already pressed most of the shirt design, so I just laid my cut pieces in place straight on that shirt that was laying in the heat press. 

Depending on the size of your shirt or project, this may take a few presses to get all your pieces pressed on the shirt. My recommendation is to lay one piece and kiss it to the fabric with the heat press (press it for about 5 seconds) and then move on to the next piece, repeat the short kiss and so on.  This way, you're not excessively heating the rest of the HTV on the shirt and you can give it all one good final press at the end without worrying about your loose pieces moving.

Just in case you were wondering, here is the finished design. I call it a success!

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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