Garment Printing Methods: HTV, DTF, DTG, Sublimation & Screen

Before I started my own workwear company, I had to research the different methods for printing garments. I saved some of that research and I've fashioned it into a guide for you.

It may not give you all the info you need, but hopefully it saves you some time!

The five most common methods of printing garments are:

• Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV)

• Direct to Film (DTF)

• Direct to Garment (DTG)

• Sublimation

• Screen Printing

  
  

I just wanted to get an overview for what each type of printing involved, then I knew what I needed to learn and what equipment I might need to buy. I also discovered you can out-source printing too, which meant I could target larger businesses with my workwear service.

There's a small intro to design software too for you to consider, it should show you roughly which path to take depending on your selected printing methods.

Questions worth asking before you start

1. What will I be selling? Each printing method has its limitations, for example you can't sublimate cotton or do full colour graphics with HTV printing, so just write down an overview of what your product will before you start, and it will become apparent which method is most suited to you.

2. Who will I sell to? I sold decorated workwear to small and medium sized businesses and to individuals when I first started. You may wish to sell novelty tshirts online or even start your own fashion brand. Or maybe you will have a market stall selling printed goods. Asking yourself this question leads to the start of your overall plan.

3. Will I print myself or out-source it? There is a learning curve to graphic design and printing which ever method you choose. I found a combination of in house HTV printing and Sublimation worked well for me. Higher volume orders and jobs requiring expensive equipment, I was able to sub contract out due to the economies of scale and improved pricing for bulk orders. This kept me lean and competetive.

4. How much do I need to spend? You can spend from as little as £500.00 or as much as £50,000 on high end printing equipment. I think unless you are planning to scale fast, or have some pre-agreed contracts to support you, you can start with outsourcing much of your printing and bring it in house over time as you grow. For small makers it's a low risk way to learn and grow, without stretching the budget. Walk before you can run.

5. Have I got the design skills to support my customers? Even if you outsource the printing, plenty of customers will need a hand with their artwork. If you're going down the business-to-business route, you need to understand the limits of each method well enough to advise people properly. That advice is often what wins you the order.

Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV)

How it works. HTV involves cutting any shapes you like out of a sheet of heat-transfer vinyl, weeding away the bits you don't want, then pressing what's left onto your material with a heat press. The heat activates a glue on the back of the vinyl and bonds it to the fabric, and then the pressure of the press pushes it into the fabric and the glue then sets — giving you a sharp design that will last for up to 50 washes or beyond in many cases.

What can I use HTV on? Simple coloured logos and shapes, names and numbers on polos, hi-vis, hoodies and team kit.

At a glance

• Best for: logos, names and numbers on workwear and team kit

• Prints on: most fabrics — cotton, poly, blends, hi-vis

• Startup cost: under £500

• Where you work: a desk in the spare room

• Speed: 12–18 garments/hour once weeded

• Upkeep: low

  
  

What it costs to run, and what you make. You can buy a blank polo shirt for £3.00. The vinyl costs are often £0.15p to £1.00, so once you add a small amount of electricity and the labour cost for a few minutes. you can create a printed polo shirt for around £6.00 most of the time. This leaves plenty of room for margins. For a single customer you may charge £15.00 and for bulk orders you can lower your price to stay competitive to £10.00 - £12.00 and still make a reasonable profit. For bulk orders of 50 or above, it's probably more profitable to go with out-sourced screen printing for single colour prints at least. You can then target larger organisations and be ultra competitive if needed, without eating your profits.

Space, power and speed. HTV is genuinely bedroom-friendly: a sturdy desk, a heat press and a normal 13A plug, no drama. Once your designs are weeded you'll press around 12–18 garments an hour — but weeding fine detail adds significant time, so budget an extra 30–60 minutes per ten garments for anything intricate.

Maintenance. Low. Replace a blade occasionally, keep your press platen clean, and recalibrate pressure now and then. That's about it.

Artwork. HTV needs vector files — SVG, AI or PDF. Outline your fonts and kill your strokes.

The classic HTV mistake — the mirror trap. You're cutting from the adhesive side, so you must horizontally flip your design before sending it to the cutter. Forget this once and you'll press a beautiful, perfectly cut, completely backwards name onto a customer's shirt. Tape a note to your monitor until it's muscle memory.

Your HTV shopping list. A reliable swing or auto-open heat press (this is where your budget goes), a desktop cutting plotter with spare blades, PU vinyl in your core colours plus a stretch variant, a weeding tool kit, and Teflon or matte pressing sheets.

Suppliers for this route. HTV vinyl, cutters and sign-making gear from MDP Supplies. Blank garments from Ralawise, Pencarrie or BTC Activewear.

Direct to Film (DTF)

How it works. DTF is the method that opened the door for small clothing brands. If you've wondered how bedroom startups ship hoodies with full-colour, photo-quality chest prints that stretch and wash well — this is usually how. The print goes onto a special film in full colour, a white ink layer is laid down behind it, and the whole thing is coated in a fine adhesive powder that's heat-cured into a flexible layer. Press that film onto a garment, the adhesive melts, and your design bonds to the fabric.

Do it yourself or outsource? You can run a DTF printer at home, but doing it properly means a dedicated room, a powder shaker, a curing oven, the electrics to handle it, and real fume extraction with carbon filtration — curing the powder gives off fumes you don't want to breathe. For most people starting out, the maths says outsource the print to a UK trade house, order it on a gang sheet, and just press at home. You get the quality with none of the maintenance or safety headaches, and it stays cheaper until you're pushing serious daily volume. The rest of this section assumes you're outsourcing the print and pressing at home.

A day pressing outsourced DTF is a good day: a parcel of film arrives, you batch-press twenty or thirty hoodies in an hour, give each a second matte finishing press for that soft retail feel, then fold, tag and pack. Because you're not babysitting a printer, your head stays on designing and selling.

At a glance

• Best for: full-colour fashion graphics, hoodies and tees

• Prints on: pretty much any fabric, light or dark

• Startup cost: £700–£1,400 (almost all of it the heat press)

• Where you work: a desk in the spare room

• Speed: 25–35 garments/hour

• Upkeep: low when outsourced; high if you run the printer yourself

  
  

What it costs to run, and what you make. Design a full-colour chest graphic, arrange it on a gang sheet and order from a UK trade house. A premium blank hoodie costs around £8.50 wholesale. Your share of the gang-sheet print comes to roughly £2.20 for an A4 area. Add a woven neck label (£0.40), a mailing bag and kraft tissue (£0.60), and Royal Mail Tracked 48 (£3.50). Sell at £35 and that's roughly £19.80 in your pocket per hoodie — about 56% net margin before you account for your pressing time.

Space, power and speed. Outsourced DTF is bedroom-friendly — a desk, a heat press and a normal 13A plug. With a good auto-open press and a smooth workflow, 25–35 garments an hour is realistic. This is where a quality press pays for itself: faster recovery, consistent heat, less fiddling.

Maintenance. Beautifully low when you outsource the print. Keep the press platen clean and recalibrate pressure occasionally. (Run a printer in-house and it's a different animal — daily head cleans, white ink agitation, waste ink management — which is exactly why most people don't, starting out.)

Artwork. DTF needs high-resolution raster files — 300 DPI PNG at actual print size with a transparent background. Leave a white background on the file and the printer will lay down a solid white rectangle on your hoodie. Not a good look.

The classic DTF mistakes. Two to drill into muscle memory. First, cold peel — wait until the transfer is fully cool before you peel the film. Peel it hot and the adhesive hasn't set, so you'll get patchy lift and a ruined print. Second, the matte finishing press for five seconds isn't optional — it drives the ink edges into the fabric and takes the print from "transfer" to "retail." Skip it and it feels plasticky.

Will the prints crack and peel? Applied at the right temperature and pressure, cold peeled, finish pressed, and washed sensibly (inside out, 30°C, no tumble), modern DTF holds up extremely well. The matte finishing press is what makes the difference.

Your DTF shopping list. The best heat press you can afford — seriously, this is basically the whole operation — plus scissors or a rotary cutter, an alignment ruler, silicone or matte finishing sheets, and a temperature probe to verify your press runs true. A press that displays 150°C but actually runs at 142°C will silently sabotage every transfer.

Suppliers for this route. Heat presses, Hotronix kit and trade DTF gang sheets from Target Transfers; Xpres if you scale into wide-format. Blank garments from Ralawise, Pencarrie or BTC Activewear.

Direct to Garment (DTG)

How it works. If DTF prints onto film to press later, DTG cuts out the middle step. Picture a big, very clever inkjet printer, except instead of paper you slide a pre-treated t-shirt onto a flat plate and the machine prints ink straight into the fibres. Because the ink sinks into the fabric rather than sitting on top, the finish feels incredibly soft — almost weightless on light garments — and it handles full-colour, photographic designs with lovely shading.

The two rules you can't bend. DTG wants cotton, and it wants pre-treatment. The chemistry only binds well to natural fibres, so 100% polyester workwear comes out dull and washes out. And on dark garments you have to spray pre-treatment fluid and press it flat before printing, or the white base sinks in and your design comes out muddy.

At a glance

• Best for: premium cotton and high-end streetwear with zero hand-feel

• Prints on: cotton and natural fibres only (pre-treatment needed on darks)

• Startup cost: high — a dedicated machine plus a controlled room

• Where you work: a proper room with steady temperature and humidity

• Speed: 10–20 dark shirts/hour, up to 30 light shirts

• Upkeep: high — daily

  
  

What it costs to run, and what you make. There's no neat per-unit example here, because the economics swing on your machine, ink draw and pre-treatment use. Expect a higher cost per print than outsourced DTF, offset by the premium hand-feel you can charge for on quality cotton blanks. It earns its keep when your market genuinely values that soft, weightless finish — not when you're chasing the lowest unit cost.

Space, power and speed. This is not a spare-bedroom job. DTG machines are large and heavy and need steady temperature and humidity control to stop the printheads clogging, plus room for a standalone pre-treatment station. Expect 10–20 dark shirts an hour, or up to 30 light shirts, which don't need pre-treatment.

Maintenance. The high-maintenance partner of the printing world. Textile inks are thick — especially the white ink for dark shirts — so they settle fast. DTG means daily head cleans, white ink agitation, waste ink management, and routine cleaning of cap assemblies and wipers. Leave a machine idle for a week while you're on holiday and dried ink can brick the printheads, costing hundreds or thousands in repairs. A DTG operator I spoke to keeps his print room on steady temperature and humidity year-round for exactly that reason; clogged heads are the enemy.

Artwork. DTG needs high-resolution raster files — 300 DPI PNG at actual print size with a transparent background. A white background becomes a printed white basecoat on the garment.

The classic DTG mistake — pre-treatment pooling. Spraying too much or too little fluid onto a dark shirt. Too little, and the white ink sinks in and colours look dead. Too much, and the ink forms a brittle shell that flakes off or stains after the first wash. Even application is everything.

Can I really run DTG at home? Technically yes, responsibly is harder. You need space for a pre-treatment spray station and dedicated humidity control, and you can't leave it idle. Most people starting out are far better served outsourcing or choosing a lower-maintenance method until the volume justifies it.

Your DTG shopping list. The DTG printer itself, a pre-treatment sprayer (mechanical if you can), a heat press or tunnel dryer to cure prints, pre-treatment fluid, and a temperature/humidity-controlled space to keep it all happy. Blank garments from Ralawise, Pencarrie or BTC Activewear.

Sublimation

How it works. Sublimation is proper chemistry, and it's lovely once you see what's happening. You print your design onto coated transfer paper with special dye inks, then clamp it against a polymer-coated surface in a heat press at around 200°C. At that heat the solid ink skips the liquid stage and turns straight into a gas. The polymer coating opens up, the gas sinks in, the surface cools, the pores close, and the colour is locked inside the material. There's no layer on top — the image is the surface. Run your finger over a sublimated photo slate and you feel stone, not ink. Nothing to peel or crack, because there's nothing sitting on top.

Why rigid gifts, not t-shirts. The chemistry only works on polyester or polymer coatings. Try it on a cotton tee and it rinses out in the first wash, which forces you onto polyester garments — often that shiny, slightly scratchy feel nobody wants to wear out. Worse, pre-made tees have seams and ridges that lift the paper under the press and give you blurry "ghosting." You can make it work on garments with proper soft-hand polyester blanks or by sublimating cut panels before they're sewn — but that's a niche within a niche. Where sublimation really earns its keep is rigid gifts: photo slates, ceramic mugs, aluminium bottles, metal keyrings, glossy coasters. Flat, solid, polymer-coated. The paper sits under perfect pressure and the results are genuinely stunning — photorealistic, vibrant, permanent.

A Saturday in a gifting operation looks like twelve custom orders — anniversary mugs, pet portrait slates, a memorial photo panel — printed, taped to each blank, pressed, peeled, checked, wrapped in tissue and boxed. One mug-printer I know swears by heat gloves after grabbing a 200°C slate barehanded exactly once.

At a glance

• Best for: rigid photo gifts — slates, mugs, bottles, coasters

• Prints on: polyester and polymer-coated surfaces only

• Startup cost: £500–£1,200

• Where you work: a desk with ventilation

• Speed: 8–12 mugs/hour single press; 36–60 with a multi-station setup

• Upkeep: medium

  
  

What it costs to run, and what you make. A customer orders a custom photo slate at £19.99. Your blank costs £2.65, paper and ink around £0.20, a presentation box £0.80, and Etsy's processing and listing fees take about £2.10. Net profit: roughly £14.24 per slate, around 71%. A slate that costs you under £3 wholesale sells comfortably at £20 because it looks and feels like a luxury product.

Space, power and speed. A similar footprint to HTV — a desk and a press — but you want good ventilation, an open window at minimum, because vaporised dye at 200°C has a sharp, unmistakable smell. Expect 8–12 mugs an hour with a single mug press, scaling to 36–60 an hour with a multi-station setup or an oven with fixtures.

Maintenance. Medium. Sublimation printers need periodic nozzle checks, and you should print something at least every few days to keep the ink flowing. Leave one idle for a fortnight and you risk clogged heads — fixable, but annoying.

Artwork. Sublimation needs high-resolution raster files — 300 DPI at actual print size.

The classic sublimation mistake — the seam ghost. Pressing a pre-made tee and finding blurry white patches around the armpits and collar where the paper lifted over thick seams. This is exactly why rigid blanks are the sweet spot — they're perfectly flat and give flawless results every time.

Can I sublimate onto dark fabric? No. Sublimation inks are completely transparent — there's no white ink in the process — so your design is invisible on anything darker than a light pastel. For dark items, use DTF, DTG or screen printing.

Your sublimation shopping list. A sublimation-capable printer with quality dye inks, the correct ICC colour profile for your ink and paper combination, high-release transfer paper, a swing-away press plus mug and bottle attachments, heat-resistant polyimide tape, protective baking paper, and proper heat gloves.

Suppliers for this route. Printer bundles, inks and ICC profiles from Ink Experts. Rigid sublimation blanks from SubliBlanks or Listawood.

Screen Printing

How it works. The oldest method here and still the backbone of commercial apparel worldwide. There's a reason your favourite band tee was screen printed: when you need hundreds or thousands of the same design, nothing else touches it on cost per unit. It's craft work — you coat a fine mesh screen with light-sensitive emulsion, expose your design onto it with UV light to make a stencil, wash out the unexposed bits, then push ink through the open mesh with a squeegee. Every colour needs its own screen, its own setup, its own registration. A four-colour design means four of everything.

Why setup time is the whole story. It makes no sense to screen print three hoodies — you'd spend longer prepping screens than printing. But once you're dialled in you can rip through sixty, eighty, a hundred prints an hour. Every screen printer will tell you the same thing: the magic is in the registration. Get it locked and watching identical prints drop one after another is deeply satisfying. The cleanup afterwards, less so.

At a glance

• Best for: bulk identical orders (200+), especially 1–2 colour designs

• Prints on: most fabrics

• Startup cost: £3,000–£10,000 for a solid manual setup

• Where you work: a workshop or large garage

• Speed: 60–120 prints/hour per operator

• Upkeep: physical

  
  

What it costs to run, and when it wins. At 200+ units the setup time amortises beautifully and your cost per unit drops below anything DTF or HTV can match, especially on one- or two-colour designs. As a rough crossover: for simple one- or two-colour work, screen starts winning around 40–60 units; for complex four-plus colour artwork, DTF and DTG stay competitive much longer, because every extra screen colour adds setup and cost.

If you outsource your screenprinting, the set up costs of a screen is typically £30.00 per colour so at 50 garments or above, it becomes a better alternative to HTV printing.

Space, power and speed. This isn't a spare-bedroom operation — it's a workshop with a carousel press bolted to the floor, screens stacked against the wall, a flash dryer humming and a washout area with a pressure hose. You'll want plumbed drainage for screen reclaim chemicals, and many manual setups need a 16A or 32A industrial socket for the curing equipment. Once set up, 60–120 prints an hour per operator is realistic — throughput nothing else matches.

Maintenance. Physical and hands-on: screen reclaim, emulsion coating, ink cleanup, squeegee care. Honest workshop graft.

Artwork. Screen printing needs vector files — SVG, AI or PDF. Outline your fonts and kill your strokes. Remember every colour is a separate screen.

The classic screen-printing trap. Saying yes to small runs. The setup is a loss on three shirts and a win on three hundred — so price small jobs accordingly or send them to DTF.

Your screen-printing shopping list. A manual carousel press, a stack of screens, emulsion and an exposure unit, a flash dryer, a washout area with a pressure hose, squeegees, and inks (plus the know-how to mix to a Pantone swatch). Blank garments from Ralawise, Pencarrie or BTC Activewear; Xpres for scaling into wider commercial setups.

Graphic Design Software

Here is a list of some Graphic design software you can use, from the biggest brands in the UK. I settled on Corel Draw and used doug greens you tube channel to learn everything I needed to know.

Vector Editing & Print-Ready Illustration

If you are creating logos, sign layouts, garment artwork for HTV or screen printing, or scalable graphics, you need a vector-focused tool. Basically creating a vectored logo means it can be resized as large as you want without getting jagged edges. Raster images cannot be blown up without losing image quality.

Adobe Illustrator — Best for Vector Editing and Illustration

The absolute industry standard for professional vector design. It has the most robust and powerful toolset on the planet for clean lines, custom typography, and complex layouts.

• The Catch: It is subscription-only (part of Adobe Creative Cloud) and has a steep learning curve for beginners.

  
  

CorelDraw Graphics Suite — Best for All-in-One Illustration and Page Design

The undisputed backbone of the traditional sign-making, vinyl-cutting, and garment-printing trades. It combines heavy-duty vector illustration with excellent multi-page page design layouts, and it is built to integrate flawlessly with production machinery.

• The Catch: It can be expensive to buy upfront, though perpetual licenses are available if you want to avoid recurring monthly costs.

  
  

Affinity Designer (FREE) — Best for Low-Cost Vector and Raster Editing

A massive favorite for bootstrapped startups and independent creators. It allows you to switch seamlessly between a vector workspace and a pixel/raster workspace in a single click.

• The Catch: While the core software is free, unlocking Canva’s premium AI tools inside Affinity requires a paid Canva plan

  
  

Photo, Raster & Layer Editing

If you are working with digital photography, complex multi-layered artwork, textures, or file preparation for full-colour digital print methods like DTF, DTG, and Sublimation, you need pixel-based (raster) powerhouse tools.

Adobe Photoshop — Best for Raster and Layer Editing

The world-famous king of photo manipulation, image editing, and digital compositing. If an image needs rescuing, color-correcting, or stripping of its background for a transparent print file, Photoshop is the professional gold standard.

• The Catch: Like Illustrator, it requires a monthly subscription and a commitment to learning its massive interface.

  
  

Branded Content & Fast Templates

If you don't have classical graphic design training but need to rapidly produce clean marketing materials, social media posts, or customer pitch decks without starting from a blank white screen.

Canva — Best for Professional Branded Content

An incredibly intuitive, browser-based powerhouse that allows anyone to lock down brand colors, logos, and fonts, then drag and drop professional layouts together in seconds.

The Print Warning: Because it is built web-first, it defaults to a low resolution (72 DPI). If you use it to design physical apparel or merchandise, you must manually force a high-resolution 300 DPI PDF/PNG export during the download stage to avoid blurry edges.

Adobe Express — Best for Template-Driven Social Posts

Adobe’s direct answer to Canva. It gives you access to an enormous library of high-quality templates, fonts, and stock imagery, backed by Adobe's smooth background-removal technology.

The Catch: It is brilliant for quick digital outputs, but less flexible than full desktop programs for complex, technical print setups.

Digital Drawing, Painting & Sketching

If your workflow relies heavily on a stylus or drawing tablet, and you want to hand-sketch digital illustrations, paint textures, or freehand unique merchandise concepts.

Procreate — Best for Subscription-Free Drawing, Painting, and Sketching

An absolute masterpiece of an iPad app that turns a tablet into a fluid, highly responsive digital canvas. It boasts a brilliant brush engine and a highly streamlined, distraction-free interface.

• The Catch: It is strictly exclusive to the Apple iPad ecosystem and is entirely raster-based (pixel-based), meaning you have to set your canvas size to a high resolution from the start.

Adobe Fresco — Best for Drawing and Painting

Built specifically for the latest stylus and touch devices, Fresco shines by combining sharp vector brushes with beautiful "live" oil and watercolor brushes that bleed and blend naturally on screen.

• The Catch: While highly fluid, it requires a subscription to unlock its full library of premium brushes and features.

Resources & links

Suppliers

Blank garments (wholesale)

• Ralawise the UK's largest range of blank apparel, workwear and teamwear https://www.ralawise.com

• Pencarrie wholesale blank clothing and workwear https://www.pencarrie.com

• BTC Activewear wholesale blanks, sportswear and workwear https://www.btcactivewear.co.uk

  
  

Heat presses, HTV & DTF transfers

• Target Transfers (Stahls' UK / Hotronix) heat presses, heat transfer vinyl and custom transfers https://www.targettransfers.com

• MDP Supplies sign and garment vinyl, cutters (Silhouette, Graphtec) and presses https://www.mdpsupplies.co.uk

  
  

Sublimation

• Ink Experts sublimation printer bundles, inks, paper and ICC profiles https://www.inkexperts.co.uk

• Xpres — sublimation printers (Sawgrass, Epson, Mimaki), inks, blanks and wide-format https://www.xpres.co.uk

• SubliBlanks rigid sublimation blanks: slates, mugs, metal panels, keyrings https://subliblanks.com

• Listawood UK mug and rigid-blank manufacturer — https://www.listawood.com

  
  

Design software

• Affinity Designer – (By Serif, now part of Canva) Fully-featured professional vector and raster design suite, completely free for individuals: https://affinity.serif.com

• Adobe (Illustrator & Photoshop) — the industry standard, subscription-based https://www.adobe.com

• Canva quick mockups (remember to force 300 DPI for anything you'll print) https://www.canva.com

• CoreDRAW https://www.coreldraw.com/en/

• ProCreate https://procreate.com/

  
  

Jargon buster

Plain-English explanations of the technical terms used above. The "Learn more" links point to external sites for now — swap each one for your own guide as you write them.

• ICC colour profile — A small settings file that tells your printer exactly how to reproduce colour on one specific ink + paper + printer combination, so what's on screen matches what comes off the press. Your sublimation supplier usually provides the right profile for their kit. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile

• DPI (dots per inch) — Print resolution. 300 DPI at the actual print size comes out sharp; 72 DPI (the web default, and Canva's default) prints soft and fuzzy. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch

• Vector vs raster — Vector files (SVG, AI, PDF) are built from maths and scale to any size cleanly, which is why HTV and screen printing need them. Raster files (PNG) are built from pixels and must be 300 DPI at print size, which is what DTF, DTG and sublimation need. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

• Gang sheet — One large transfer sheet packed with lots of designs at once, so a trade DTF house prints them all together and you only pay for the area you use.

• Weeding — Picking away the unwanted vinyl from around a cut HTV design before pressing, so only the bits you want end up on the garment. Fiddly on fine detail — budget time for it. Learn more: [The Proper Hustle guide — coming soon]

• Pre-treatment — A liquid sprayed and pressed onto (usually dark) cotton before DTG printing, so the white ink sits up and the colours stay vivid instead of sinking in.

• Cold peel — Letting a DTF transfer cool completely before peeling the film, so the adhesive has set and the print doesn't lift. Some films are "hot peel" instead — always check the spec for the film you're using.

• Registration — Lining up each colour screen precisely over the last one in screen printing, so a multi-colour design prints cleanly with no gaps or overlap. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_printing

• Emulsion — The light-sensitive coating on a screen-printing mesh. UV light hardens it where you want ink blocked; you wash out the rest to leave your stencil. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_printing

• Polymer-coated blank — A mug, slate, bottle or panel with a special coating that sublimation ink can bond into. No coating, no print — the ink simply won't take on bare material. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sublimation_printing

• Pantone (PMS) — A standardised colour-matching system, so a specific colour (a brand's exact red, say) comes out identical every time, on any kit. Learn more: https://www.pantone.com

• Hand-feel — Trade slang for how a print feels to the touch. "Zero hand-feel" means you can barely feel it (DTG on cotton); a thick, rubbery print has "heavy hand."

• Heat press types — Clam (hinges open like a clam shell), swing-away (the top swings aside so you're not reaching under the heat) and auto-open (springs open by itself when the timer ends). Auto-open speeds up batch work and cuts down on scorching. Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_press

• Fume extraction & carbon filtration — A system that captures and filters the fumes given off when curing DTF powder in-house, so you're not breathing them in. Essential if you run a DTF printer yourself; not needed when you outsource the print and only press at home.