Avery Personal Creations InkJet Iron-On Dark T-Shirt Transfers, White, Five Sheets per Pack (03279)

Shhh... don't tell the T-shirt shops, but I can get laser quality prints on the dark transfers. Because they are a peel back, not a direct iron-on, it doesn't gum up my printer. Proves a little more challenging to peel the backing off, but you can do it! I have faith in you. ;-)

I've printed about 10 shirts using Avery's Dark Shirt Transfers. I have been disappointed in every single one. The shirt color bleeds through any light colored part of the design making the end product look washed-out and dingy. I've talked to Avery about the problem but they offer no solution other than sending me more paper to offset the paper I've used. I have tried every trick I know of to get it right: Shortening ironing time, less pressure, washing or not washing the shirts first but every result is the same. Avery products work great on light colored fabrics but are terrible on dark colors. A red shirt with any white in the design and you wind up with a pink design and so on and so on. Perhaps other brands won't have this problem but I have not checked them out. It gets too expensive to keep buying shirts and paper just to have another disappointing end product.

This is going to be a long review with lots of details that I hope will be helpful for people thinking about using this product. I consider myself to be a pretty handy/craft-savvy person. I sew clothes, I make paper art, I like to assemble IKEA furniture... fine. But these Avery iron-on transfers were the most irritatingly frustrating things I've dealt with in a long time.

I wanted to create a checkerboard effect on a black shirt (cotton Hanes "perfect tee") with white squares of the label. Then, on top, I wanted to iron on a big dinosaur. Sounded simple enough at the time. Little did I know that this small project intended as a "Secret Santa" present would stretch on for days.

The printing and cutting process was simple enough. I used HP ink and had no problems with the ink smearing or fading (even after a machine wash -- I'll get to that later). Peeling the transfer was not a nightmare because I creased my labels before I cut them -- when I cut them, the transfer lifted up at the crease. With the dinosaur, whose edges were more detailed, I cut out a tab which I ripped off, and it was smooth sailing. I will say that the dinosaur's toe got torn off during the label peeling process, however -- peel slowly and with great caution!

Maybe I'm really dumb, but I wasn't sure what kind of surface to use while working on these labels. The instructions said to use a heat-resistant surface, no metal, no glass, and NO IRONING BOARD. I had a roll of cork lying around, so I spread that out on my wood floor and ironed on that, but felt ridiculous. I prayed that the floor wasn't ruined when I was done (it wasn't, but later on when I used a cheap wooden table, the top of the table bubbled a little).

I guess if you're just ironing something small onto a large shirt, these labels are fine. I cut 2 labels into 4 pieces each to create an oversized checkerboard look over the entire front of a size large shirt, and then used 1 entire label for a large dinosaur. You have to be VERY careful to not touch any of the already ironed pieces with the hot iron (anything being ironed has to be covered with a protective sheet of the enclosed tissue paper), or they will bubble up, roll up, and peel off. This happened to me a couple of times, and I had to heat up the damaged parts and peel them off, then start over again. I nearly scrapped the project about 100 times but plodded along just to finish the damn thing.

I would not recommend doing a design that is larger than the 8.5x11 inch transfer paper because the tissue paper that they give you to put between the iron and the transfer is 8.5x11 as well. If you have a large design, like a dinosaur, for instance, you really can't put 2 pieces of tissue paper overlapping over the design and iron on top of that. When you peel the tissue paper off, the design will have a giant crease in it -- which you'll have to iron out again, with the tissue paper, once it cools off. You have to iron for about 40 seconds to 1.5 minutes, then cool for 2-3 minutes. If you had a lot of stuff to iron on, like me, it will take forever to iron, let cool, peel, iron, cool, peel...

If you have a rectangular design, or any type of design with sharp corners, beware -- the corners love to roll up. Mine did, and I tried to iron them down again and again, but they refused to stay in place. I ended up snipping them off and making rounded corners. I even tried using Krazy Glue to hold the corners down once I was at the home stretch of finishing this project, but that didn't hold these devilish labels down, either. (A quick note -- in case anyone plans on doing a design where 2 pieces of transfer have to overlap -- like when I ironed the dino on top of two of the white label squares on the shirt -- they stick to each other very well and there is no noticeable seam.)

I washed the finished project in cold water on delicate, and when I pulled the shirt out, it was really strange. The shirt had shrunken slightly, but the label hadn't -- so the shirt was rolling up in certain places. The corners were coming up again, too. The places where I had re-heated the transfer to tear them off to start over again had a gluey residue that looked shiny and noticeable. Some transfers were wrinkly and bubbling. Other transfers that I had intended to leave white had been ironed so much that they became a toasty beige. I wanted to die.

I heated up my iron once more and busted out the tissue paper. After a gruesome 4 days of working on a simple t-shirt, I strongly wish that I had just paid a little more money to have this shirt made professionally ($5 t-shirt plus two packages of labels -- it ended up being about $40 -- I should've just bought an even cooler shirt!). No one would want to wear this thing, and after another wash, I think it will self-destruct.

After several days of this mayhem, I never want to use these again. The results are not that impressive. A brief recap, in case you didn't care to read my story:
- If your design is large, it is likely to be difficult to iron properly.
- If your design has many small components to iron separately, it will take forever to iron, let cool, peel, and then iron again (at least approximately 5 minutes per piece).
- If your design has a lot of sharp corners, the corners are almost guaranteed to start rolling up, no matter how well you iron.
- If your design is meant to be white, there is a risk that after ironing your heart out, the white will look like a toasty almond color.
- The label is thick and does not shrink/stretch to accommodate anything other than something like heavy cotton.

Choose wisely, folks. Let me know if you have any questions.

I bought these in the hopes of making some cheap, personalized t-shirts. I used plain black Dickie's shirts and got great results with these transfers. The white parts are bright, the colors look good, and they have stood up to SEVERAL wearings and washings without peeling or anything. Great value!

I used this to make character T's for my son. I found I had to adjust my ink settings on my printer to get the best finished product. The actual paper was great to work with--no need to mirror-image text. Hard to remove the protective overlay by bending back the graphic and peeling. Instructions say you can also gently "tear" the overlay and the transfer paper with the graphic will withstand it. This worked MUCH better and saved me a LOT of time! The graphics have held up to the 2-year old and the wash so far--MULTIPLE (10?) washings.