One of my daughters recently stage managed her school’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate factory and I framed her signed poster. But the boring frame needed a bit of embellishment. I thought about lasering the frame itself but I wasn’t sure what the wood would look like under the paint (or what the paint was made of, or what the wood was, etc.) so instead I decided to try out the polyester label material I got from Online Labels (OL177LP, specifically) recently but hadn’t lasered yet.
Cut (just through the label, not the backing - based on settings found on the forum) but not removed:
I’ve never used an actual vinyl cutter to make stickers like this, so I have no real comparison, but the only part that was slightly hard was getting the sticker off the backing onto the transfer tape. Each letter required a bit of encouragement to prefer the blue tape over the backing, but once it was started, it stayed attached well. I weeded out the interiors of the letters before trying the transfer, but I’m not sure it was needed since I probably could have just not encouraged them to transfer (but gorilla tape worked great to do this since it definitely grabs the sticker better then the backing). Transferring from the blue tape to the frame was trivial - laid the tape down, rubbed the entire thing with a scraper, carefully pulled the blue tape off…
Online Labels makes it easy to get a sample of a material - they sent me a couple of sheets of a few different materials to try out. Now I have to actually go buy some to have on hand.
My only suggestion is to use clear packing tape instead. It lets you more easily see how things are lined up.
I use 3M packing tape for my vinyl cutter projects and my only gripe is that it’s “too good”. A few stick/remove cycles on my shirt and it’s sufficiently “dirty” that the vinyl sticks to it more than the backing paper, but not more than the object I’m sticking it to.
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