Congratulations— it will probably be several days until you see this.
My supplies arrived today so I loaded up the ink tanks and tried a coaster… Success!
Plenty more work to do but off to a good start!
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I want you to see the difference with laminate and without.
There are 2 ways I laminate.
- Sublimate on the laminate
- Heat press laminate on sublimation
This example is sublimate on the laminate. The colors in the ink are so much more vibrant when you use laminate.
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I have a couple of projects I would like for you to make this weekend.
- A picture of your animal companions. I want the sublimated picture to be round.
- Sublimate a picture of your favorite season. Take your sublimated picture into the GF and make a keychain
@cynd11 Hello sugar!! Could you show the kitty keychain I made for you?
Well, this fish on the coaster used to be a pet. Fish count!
This weekend I am getting in some other stuff including plastic made for sublimation.
So far I am pretty happy. Colors are not perfect, but the reds look good and the blacks look rich. There is a bit of a green color cast to figure out and images are overall somewhat too saturated. I knew I would have stuff like that to figure out.
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@cynd11 Thank you for posting. Your kitties still long phenomenal!!
Those look great!!!
Fish are also animal companions I cried when my brother‘s 10-year-old sucker catfish died and I was 26 years old— the year was 1994. My brother and I even held a funeral —-he was buried in a shoebox in the backyard. Our parents were out of town and they were upset when they got home and learned CJ died. He was a little over 8” in length. My brother never got another aquarium because even after all these years the death of CJ is still very sad for my brother.
Back to sublimation I suspect different inks and different sublimation papers will have different looks.
I got my color correct workflow dialed in and figured out settings for polyester fabric.
Yesterday I had an idea for a shirt design, so I made it. This is great, why did I wait so long to try this?
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WOW JUST WOW!! Your color work sample is amazing!! The shirt is also really nice!!
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Ooh. I’m sad I missed the revival of this thread. I have an Epson 2760 (or the like) converted, but the ink dried up during the pandemic when didn’t make it into my studio. I have been unable to save it, despite my best efforts. Luckily, I think I paid about $100 for it.
I’ve been trying to be good and wait to get back into sublimating, but it’s hard. I love it, too. So magical!
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I think there’s a desperation move where you can use a syringe to push cleaning fluid through the print heads. It is high risk but if the printer is toast …
I think I tried that. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try again. 
I’ve wanted to try sublimating for so long but read if you don’t use the ink pretty continuously it dries up, so I have never taken the plunge to convert an Epson printer. I even have the heat press with all of the attachments for mugs and plates, hats, but don’t want to ruin a printer and throw money down the drain if that’s going to happen. Anyone know if there’s a way to preserve the ink or preventing it from drying up if you only want to use it every now and then for projects?
I don’t use mine for sublimation but I have a popular Epson that is commonly used for that, no cartridges. I have owned so many printers over the years and they all let me down at the worst possible time.
Now I just have a reminder set to print a test page every week. The amount of ink the tanks hold will probably out-last me, even with those test pages. I used to re-fill my cartridges back when that was a thing and the amount of ink they actually held was miniscule.
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I do what @eflyguy does, and just print a test page every week if I don’t do a real sub print. I have also read that using the printer’s built in nozzle check function will move enough ink, but printing a test page is easier for me.
It IS a small PITA to keep the printer from committing suicide, but sublimation is lots of fun. Since you have the heat press, go for it @grottfam ! (I have had really good results with InkOwl sub inks and papers, and they provide a color correction profile.)
I haven’t yet figured out how to sub onto wood, my first experiment was a dismal failure.
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@eflyguy and @GrooveStranger, that’s a simple solution!!! Now I’m really getting that sublimation itch!! 
Thank you!
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Hopping in a bit late to add some materials to this thread for when people look up sublimation here in the future. We’ve been doing sublimation for a while and love it. One of the things we wanted to explore the most when we got our Glowforge last year was the intersection of laser cutting and sublimation. The materials that work reasonably well for both are:
Wood (though keep in mind that sublimation ink doesn’t have a white base, so the colors won’t “pop” as much),
Unisub Hardboard (we bought at JPP)
Clear cast acrylic (though you probably want to back it with something)
White cast acrylic
Sublimation acrylic - think this is relatively new, JPP also has it - white on one side and clear on the other…
Here’s a pic of all of our tests with those materials (in order of list above). Hope this helps!
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I love the look of sublimation on white acrylic. It’s got a kind of dreamy quality.
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