I am starting a clothing brand and beginning with hats. I am awaiting the arrival of my Glow forge to make my leather patches.
I have one question that may be obvious or a now and leads into some apparel questions so if anyone has experience I would like to hear from you.
I am wanting to create a design for underneath the bill of that hat. So the under side of the bill can have a design on it as well. I have seen people screen print and sew over the bill with designed fabric. HOWEVER I am curious if I can either laser the design onto the hat or create a stencil type from plastic or something that I can use and paint over or spray paint the design on the bill of the hat with some type of high quality fabric paint?
Thank You for the info and glad to be apart of the community!
You could cut a stencil from mylar or cardstock pretty quick. Once you have the bill dimensions firmed up, changing out your artwork for a custom job would be easy. that’s a neat idea.
Depending on the type of hat and how squishable it is, you could likely take out the crumb tray, flip your hat over, tie it down, and engrave directly.
FYI when you first get your machine, after you get it up and running be sure to run all the way through the First Prints section of support.glowforge.com - that entire website has loads of info, but that particular section will answer so many questions before you know to ask them
Under the bill is interesting. Perhaps heat transfer vinyl (which is not the scary, bad for lasers vinyl) would give a more consistently professional finish than fabric paint?
HTV will work, the problem I have run into is with the heat-press: regular hat presses are curved the wrong way for curved-brim caps (heat is from the concave top platten), and if you want to cover the entire surface of a flat-brimmed cap with a flat press, you end up crushing the stiffened front panels. HTV graphics on the forward part of a flat-brim work fine in a flat-press.
