Blog - How To: Custom Halloween Garments with HTV

Posted in: Guides & Education

By Molly Harmon

How To: Custom Halloween Garments with HTV

In this blog we are sharing high quality products, equipment and techniques to create unique custom Halloween garments with HTV for your customers.

What will Halloween 2020 bring?

Halloween has been growing as an industry year on year in the UK and although social distancing restrictions may affect this year’s event, this doesn’t mean that demand is decreasing for 2020. Customers will still be celebrating in their social bubbles or over group video calls with friend’s and family. Fancy dress sales in 2017 hit £166 million the UK alone and total retail spending in 2018 for Halloween was up to £419 million! Help make this year’s Halloween great for your customers and start creating their spooky t-shirts, jumpers and more!

Custom Halloween Garments with HTV

Whether it’s a t-shirt, jumper or sweatshirt, unique custom Halloween garments with HTV will make your products stand out from the crowd to your customers and increase your sales this Halloween. As part of Groupe Stahl, we manufacture and sell Stahls’ Heat Transfer Vinyl, the world’s leading vinyl, in over 300 colours starting at just £3.50. With so many options, how do you choose? Click here to see the most sought after trending HTV colours for Halloween 2020. Today we’re going to share how we made this layered Happy Halloween T-Shirt using Flock and Glitter Heat Transfer Vinyl and a Silhouette Cutter.

Choose your design and Heat Transfer Vinyl. We're going to create a pumpkin with both Orange Glitter and Flock Heat Transfer Vinyl and add 'Happy Halloween' wording in Black Flock HTV in the font Snap ICT.

Cut your designs out onto your chosen HTV. Pictured here is the Silhouette Cameo Digital Cutter 4 (12”). Click here to view, available online today at £291.66.

Weed your design. Our favourite tool for weeding is the Stahls’ LED Weeder. The LED light increases your visibility, making weeding a much quicker and more accurate process. And for only £20 it’s a great price to increase your efficiency. Because we’re combining Flock and Glitter HTVTVHTC , we’ve cut our design in both and will use separate pieces of each for the final product.

Set your heat press to the correct fuse setting. We’re using the Hotronix Dual Air Fusion IQ so we can have one platen set for Glitter and one set for Flock, speeding up the production process.

Pre-press your garment. This is important to remove any excess moisture from the garment and to remove any creases before fusing your HTV.

Place your first HTV layer onto the garment, adhesive side down, ready to be fused. Don’t forget to use release paper to protect the garment and the vinyl.

Fuse your HTV for the appropriate time. Here we’re using Glitter which is 10 seconds at 160 °C. The Dual Air Fusion IQ Heat Press has air controlled pressure of which all settings are already programmed into your press when it arrives, meaning you don’t have to worry about pressure at all.

Peel off the carrier Glitter is a hot peel but some HTV’s have cold or warm peels depending on what you’re using.

glitter htv carrier remove halloween design

Next, we’re adding the flock layer to our design. We’ve taken the middle pieces of the pumpkin and placed them adhesive side down in between the Glitter ready to fuse. Don’t forget to change the setting of your heat press if you’re using a different type of HTV.