Watch Out for Blue Meanies when Sublimating Shirts

What in the world are blue meanies? If you sublimate shirts without lint-rolling them, you undoubtedly have seen them, but you may not know what they are or where they come from. When you pull a polyester shirt out of a plastic bag, you charge the shirt with static electricity. In drier times of the year, or climates where it is dry all the time, static electricity will be worse. Since the shirt is full of static, it attracts dust particles in the air more so than if it was not full of static.

Dust particles contain polyester particles, and they are generally not visible to the naked eye. If you press a shirt with the dust particles present, the color in the particle will outgas and get a little bit bigger than the original dust particle. When you open the press and take the transfer paper off, you will see little (mostly) bright blue sublimated dust-shaped specks covering the entire area that your heat press touched.

Finding those blue meanies for the first time is irritating. Finding out that they will not wash out is downright upsetting. The good thing is that this need not happen. To prevent a bad case of the blue meanies, all you have to do is use an adhesive-style lint roller. Place the shirt onto the heat press over a piece of Vapor Foam. The Vapor Foam holds up the portion of the shirt that will be sublimated so that only that area touches the top platen of your heat press when it closes. Gently lint-roll the area of the shirt that will touch the top platen of the heat press. That should remove all dust from the shirt and prevent a nasty case of the blue meanies.

-Kevin Lumberg, Sublimation Specialist