Personalized Drinks With SubliCraft Wine Cups
The amount of sublimation drinkware to customize is only growing, and Heat Press Nation’s SubliCraft is no stranger to some of the most popular trends in that field. To add to SubliCraft’s repertoire are 12 ounce stemless wine cups, built with an insulated stainless steel material that’s sure to keep any hot or cold beverage in check. With their coated white exterior for sublimation, these wine cups are ready to hold your best designs as cleanly as a sublimation skinny tumbler. Though with their specific shape in mind, the best way to customize SubliCraft’s wine cups is with none other than SubliCraft’s shrink wrap sleeves. The 4.9 by 5.11 inch sleeves in particular are the perfect size for these wine cups, which you can easily prepare multiples of, on even a countertop-sized convection oven.
Before getting started however, be sure to always use a separate convection oven for wrappable sublimation blanks. As this is a gaseous transfer method, it’s best to keep those fumes away from the same oven used to cook foods. But to begin, prepare your design within the imprint area of a SubliCraft wine cup. This part of the process can be simplified by using this item’s template from HeatPressNation.com. Once it’s been loaded on software like Adobe Photoshop, all that’s left is to import your design and any extra elements over, then save as a separate file as soon as it’s assembled. The template has also been readily adjusted so that it won’t stretch past the lower curve of the cup. If you’d like to print multiple designs in one sheet of paper, you can import each or multiples of your design in a new document. For example, four small designs created here will be able to fit on 8-and-a-half by 11 inch paper.
But with your design ready to go, you may print it through a sublimation printer. Sawgrass users will print through Sawgrass Print Manager with the following 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 depending on the preferred level of color saturation. And with the transfer printed, trim around the edges of your design, then take the cup’s lid and any contents out. Wrap and heat tape it around the upper half of the cup, slide the prepared wine cup inside a 4.9 by 5.11 inch SubliCraft shrink wrap, then wear heat-resistant gloves to run a heat gun around the cup until the wrap has fully shrunk. In maintaining a tight wrap, be sure to not point the heat gun for too long at one particular spot.
You’ll also need to wrap and heat the wine cup with another sleeve in protecting it from oven rack burns. If working with multiple wine cups, follow this same process in covering each one. But before continuing, this would be a good time to preheat the sublimation oven to 350 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve found 356 degrees Fahrenheit to be a solid base for stainless steel SubliCraft blanks. With all the wine cups double shrink wrapped, they’re ready to be cooked inside the oven. As we’re using a dedicated toaster oven for sublimation, we’ll be able to fit about 6 wrapped wine cups inside. The amount to fit inside will vary depending on the size of your oven, and whether it's single or multi-shelved. For a quick demonstration, we’ll load 3 wine cups inside our toaster oven for at least 6 minutes.
A longer time may be required depending on how even your oven provides heat, or how close its heating elements are placed to the items. Once the oven reaches time, open it and take the wine cups elsewhere to cool down for at least 30 to 50 seconds. Afterwards, peel the wraps and transfers off of each one quickly and they’ve now been sublimated with your very own designs. As soon as your wine cups have completely cooled down, they’ll be ready to hold anyone’s favorite drink on the go with style. To learn more about SubliCraft blanks and other sublimation products, be sure to visit our YouTube channel, or our website at HeatPressNation.com.
