How To Decorate SubliCraft Cup Sleeves
Whenever your coffee cup is too hot to handle, or perhaps you’d like to keep your plastic cup cool, the SubliCraft cup cooler sleeves are a great solution that can look eye-catching with your designs and images. As they’re designed to simply keep disposable cups insulated, both the coffee and 16 ounce cup sleeves are perfectly suited for personal use and special occasions, as well as for business purposes as gift shop items or freebies. With their white 100% polyester exterior, these USA-made cup sleeves are soft to hold, and are capable of displaying your transfers vividly despite their small size.
To begin, you’ll first need to scale down your graphics or image accordingly to the size of a cup sleeve. You can download our Photoshop templates for either the coffee or 16 ounce cup sleeve in the description below. By using either one, you can simply double click on the smart object layer behind the imprint and safety layers, import your images onto there, then save it to have them appropriately warped to the shape of the sleeve. As soon as your sleeve transfer is ready, you can hide the imprint and safety layers and print the document through your sublimation printer.
If you’re using a Sawgrass printer, send it to Sawgrass Print Manager with these settings: Substrate set to Polyester, Paper set to your Paper’s profile, leave Mirror checked, and set the Color Mode in the Color tab to Photographic or Vivid depending on your transfer’s level of detail. Once ready, go ahead and click Print on SPM. With the transfer printed, trim around the printed image, then attach your sleeve onto it with either heat tape or adhesive spray. For SubliCraft cup sleeves, set your machine to 60 seconds at 385 degrees Fahrenheit with light pressure. If you intend on pressing multiple sleeves at once, you’ll need to add 5 seconds for each additional sleeve. We’ll be demonstrating this by pressing both our coffee and 16 ounce cup sleeves, totalling our time at 65 seconds.
Once your heat press reaches temperature, place a sheet of parchment paper on the lower platen, then add your sleeves on top with the paper side up. Cover your items with another sheet of parchment paper, then press. When the time reaches zero, open your machine and allow the transfers to cool down for a moment. Afterwards, you may quickly peel the transfers off the sleeves and you’ve now sublimated a side of them! To apply a transfer on the back side, allow the sleeves to completely cool down, then you may follow the same steps to complete your sleeve. But before proceeding, be sure that your strips of heat tape aren’t covering the sleeve’s sublimated side by any means.
If you’d like to share any of your custom SubliCraft sleeves with us, along with a large community of heat transfer enthusiasts, feel free to join our HeatPressNation Creators Facebook group, at heat.press/FBgroup. But to learn more about SubliCraft products and other sublimation blanks, please visit our website at HeatPressNation.com. For any questions, you can always get in touch with a MyExpert representative at support.heatpressnation.com.
