# What am I doing wrong? Printing and Cutting Fail



## ShannonStarshine (Feb 26, 2017)

I recently purchased a Heat Press, Cricut explore air and Epson printer. I design a simple kids tshirt on the cricut design software. When I printed the test page it had pretty bad horizontal streaking. Cleaning/Aligning did not fix it. I took printer back to store and just used my HP 1512 home printer just to do some test shirts. Still had a little streaking. But I wanted to try the Cricut Cutter. I put transfer paper on the cutting mat, set it to iron on, it looks like it cut ok. When I removed it from the cricut it left a line down the center of the design where it had scraped the ink off the transfer. Then when I tried to peel the transfer from the cricut cutting may it just tore up. One part is stuck pretty good on there and I had to use something to scrape it off the rest of the way. Transfer ruined. I used Avery iron on transfers because that is what I had available to me at the time. What am I doing wrong? It looked so simple on Youtube. I made some shirts about 10 years ago and used to have to cut out all the designs with scissors and an xacto knife. I don't remember having these issues.


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## AnthonyF (Nov 11, 2016)

It is possible that the print issues you are having are the paper. Does your printer give you the streaking with plain paper?
I can't help you with the Cricut, as I have no experience with that machine. The mats I've used, and they can start out too sticky for paper. You can mitigate that by taking a shirt and pressing it down on the mat, then peel it off. Do that a couple of times and you'll reduce the stickiness. You'll want a spatula like this: https://smile.amazon.com/Cricut-Tools-Craft-Spatula-Scraper/dp/B00EZUK7IG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1488165074&sr=8-2&keywords=cricut+spatula 
to ease the cut pieces off.
https://smile.amazon.com/Cricut-Too...qid=1488165074&sr=8-2&keywords=cricut+spatula


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## Kreative Press (Feb 27, 2017)

I have not had much success with the Avery transfer. Are you separating the transfer from the carrier sheet after printing the putting it on the mat?


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