Make Your Own Cola-Style Bottle From SubliCraft
When custom standard water bottles aren’t enough to catch anyone’s attention, SubliCraft now offers sublimation bottles in the familiar shape of a cola bottle. Unlike most of those however, these 17 ounce bottles are made with a durable and insulated stainless steel material, sporting a white exterior coated for sublimation. Sublimation transfers applied onto these bottles will look just as clean as any similar sublimation drinkware, whether you’re applying bold and flat colors, or overall vibrant designs. With their large imprint area on the lower half, these bottles are actually possible to customize with the right mug press despite their shape. With this in mind, we’ll be showing how to customize a bottle with the Heat Press Nation CraftPro mug and tumbler press.
First, you’ll need to create your design within the imprint area of a SubliCraft cola shaped bottle. To make this process easier, you can use a downloadable template at HeatPressNation.com for this item, which can be loaded on popular design software like Adobe Photoshop. This template is readily prepared to the bottle’s imprint area, with guides and layers indicating the safety areas for text and other extra elements for your design. Once your design is ready, you may send it to your sublimation printer. Sawgrass users will need to print through Sawgrass Print Manager with these settings: Substrate to Stainless Steel Tumbler, Paper to the loaded paper’s profile, leave Mirror checked, and the Color Mode in the Color tab to Photographic or Vivid based on the preferred level of color saturation.
With the transfer printed, trim around the design’s edges, then tightly wrap and heat tape it around the flat area of a SubliCraft cola shaped bottle. Before continuing, make sure that your mug press is ready for taller items such as these bottles. For CraftPro machines, this will be as simple as replacing the default TruePrint mug element with the tumbler attachment. For a further look on how to do so, you can check out our tutorial on 30 ounce SubliCraft tumblers linked below, which also features the CraftPro mug and tumbler press in action. But assuming your mug press is ready, you can test press and adjust to medium pressure for the cola shaped bottle. Once pressure has been found, take the bottle out and turn on the mug press, setting it to 60 to 90 seconds at 365 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then as soon as the machine hits temperature, remove the cap and any contents inside the bottle, slide it inside the heating element and press. To safely handle items near active heating elements, it's best to have heat-resistant protection like HPN’s Pro Grade Protective Gloves worn during the process. Also, if you’re applying a full wrap design on your bottle, be sure to press it a second time while rotated to the opposite side. This will allow the transfer to completely apply itself onto the item. Once your time reaches zero, take the bottle elsewhere to cool down for at least 30 seconds. Once cooled, quickly peel the transfer off the bottle and it’ll now permanently display your colorful design thanks to sublimation. You can learn more about SubliCraft, CraftPro, and sublimation in general on our YouTube channel, or by visiting us at HeatPressNation.com.
