Social Media Hate

So, what is up with all the hate on social media? I don’t get it. My husband doesn’t do social media, so he asked me to post his boat for sale, but we listed his phone number and said to contact him. I received a message saying “oh you’re an idiot. Post something for sale but not the phone number”. The phone number was on there. Within 4 minutes he had sent me all kinds of nasty messages calling me “ghetto trash”. Then he blocked me surprise, surprise. Like what would inspire him to attack me like that for no reason. I had another user reach out to me on a blog before and same thing just started attacking me. Saying that they had seen me out doing things that absolutely weren’t true or even relevant. They said they saw me with my dad (who happens to be deceased) so it was all just lies. But why?? Why do people feel the need to reach out and spew hate at strangers for no reason? I see it all the time on famous you-tubers and tik tok accounts. I don’t know. I am just not that type of person who would ever just spew hate at someone and call them names. Keyboard warriors. Ugh. I just needed to vent about that.

Something new....

 Well hello!  Yes, I have been MIA forever.  I know, I know.  I always think about blogging and then bam! Life hits me in the face again.  BUT...I am here to talk about something new I have been working on.  Sublimation printing.  It differs from iron on vinyl in the way that with sublimation, your ink is actually transferred into the item.  There are always caveats of course.

I will say this is very much a trial by fire kind of thing.  Expect mistakes.  Expect learning curves.  I am just now getting to the point where I am getting more comfortable with making certain items and not finding a million faults with it.

I actually started with attempting tumblers but who knows what I was thinking because they are HARD to get down.  The ghosting is a huge problem for many people.  I then attempted a magnet which was fairly easy, even if a little off center.  Oh and don't mind the towel that we have that has the outline of the photo now inked into it. A learning curve!

Shirts are by far what I have been trying the most.  Learning what materials work best, how to not get the design on the back of the shirt also, how to keep your design in place.  The biggest caveat to shirts is the higher the polyester count, the brighter the image.  Now, polyester shirts are not always easy to find but thankfully there are a lot of shops popping up that sell sublimation blanks.  The next is that you cannot print white.  There is not white ink in the majority of sublimation printers (or maybe not in any, I am not sure).  

I will explain more in future blogs but I wanted to provide some examples of different materials.

This shirt is 100% polyester. There is no white so your image will take on the color of the shirt.

This is a faux bleached shirt that is 95% polyester and the colors are popping!

This shirt is 100% polyester

This is a great side by side comparison.  Same design.  Shirt on the left is the faux bleach 95% polyester.  Shirt on the right is 65% polyester, 35% cotton and I bleached it myself.  It has a much more vintage look to it because essentially only 65% of the ink was absorbed.



This one is 60% polyester/ 40% cotton but no bleach.

Another 95% polyester

Thanks for checking it out!

This Years Valentines

 

We took a break from valentine’s last year as Kinley was not involved in any thing in which she could exchange valentines.  Surprisingly, I had a bit of a hard time finding something that we loved this year that we haven’t done before.  We did 2 sets this year.  One for her travel softball team, and one for her class.  I will explain both here.

 

For softball, I had the idea that I would try my hand at making scrunchies.  I mean, you can learn anything on You-tube, right??  Unfortunately, I could not find any softball themed material to do this so off to Amazon I went.

 

For this template, I went to Etsy and bought it.  I could have made something similar, but this person created the idea, so I am all about supporting it.  I used my Cricut print and cut feature for these.  The one downside was that I only had one trip to Walmart to buy cardstock in time and it was much thinner than I liked, and I felt too thin to withstand the scrunchie on it.  So, I flipped the image in Cricut design space and made it a solid color.  So, for each valentine, there were 2 print and cut items and we glued them together.  Totally my fault for not being prepared with the right items.  It would have cut our time in half.  What do you think of these?

 

The valentines for the class also were made using the print and cut option and the design was bought off Pinterest.  I was satisfied with the thickness of the cardstock for this project.  The only downfall we had on these was there wasn’t much room to write who they were to or from.  She could have used the back of them I suppose.  The valentine design was created to hold a sucker/pencil etc.  We did use suckers, but Kinley is very into making bracelets with the tiny rubber bands.  She decided to make one for each of the 28 students in her class.  Very ambitious of her!  To attach them, I had to unhook the s-clip and thread it through.  I truly hope her classmates enjoy these cute valentines.