You may be wondering why this mug looks so dodgy… well it’s because it is one of the many mugs in my mug graveyard ? (I have nearly 100 badly printed mugs tucked away ?)
As I mentioned the other day when talking about my ‘love to make’ I used to hate making mugs… Around this time last year, I decided to invest my profits into a heat press and sublimation printer. I couldn’t wait to start making a new product! But after a couple of months I started to get inconsistent results, weird colours, mugs burning in random places, faded images, dark images, arghhh! I was getting so frustrated as I thought I had learnt how to make them correctly but my previous settings only worked once in a blue moon ?
I ended up joining a Facebook group which helps with dye sublimation problems. After chatting on there it turned out I had been sold a cheap mug press and the wrong inks for a lot more money than they should have been worth. I was gutted, I had to stop selling mugs for a while and sell on the equipment for about a sixth of what I actually paid for it to start with ?
After this traumatic and stressful time, I did A LOT of research. I found a press and inks from trusted companies with lots of reviews and feedback from real people. Last summer I started pressing again and the first mug I did came out 90% perfect. A few mugs later and I had perfected the mug pressing technique ?
This whole event was a massive learning curve for me. Research is key to everything and sometimes I try and race to get something done when I need to just take a step back, take my time and I will end up with much better results ?
I will eventually be selling all my dodgy mugs in a seconds sale for a very cheap price so watch out for that if you want one ?