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Your Sawgrass Printer ink level status keeps you informed about your ink levels, ensuring you can replace the cartridge before it runs out during print jobs. 

Your Sawgrass Starter Kit

When you receive your Sawgrass system, you will receive the printer and a starter kit which includes your first set of inks. Depending on where you purchase your printer, you may receive starter inks carts or regular ink carts. The printer will use ink to initially fill the ink lines and prepare the printer for use. 

What is the difference between starter ink carts and standard ink carts? 

The amount of ink in each type of cart is different. See below: 

·      Starter Carts include 20 mls.

·      Standard Carts include 31 mls. 

Ink Warnings You Will See On Your Printer

The first ink level status your Sawgrass printer will display is low ink. If you have received starter carts, you may see a low ink status soon after the initial setup of the printer. This is normal and does not mean you need to replace the cartridges immediately. You can safely continue printing. It simply means, one of your ink cartridges is running low. We recommend you order inks from your Sawgrass Dealer at this time.

The replace ink or depleted ink status means that your printer has detected that one of your ink cartridges is empty. To maintain optimal printer performance, please replace the empty cartridge(s) to resume printing. Until the empty carts are replaced, your printer will not allow you to print. 

For more information on your printer, check out this article on Printer Maintenance and more on our Sawgrass Care Page.

You may know how to apply your designs to a sublimation substrate like a pro but sometimes coming up with a design is the most challenging part of crafting. You want to be unique and have your work stand out from everyone else but that can be very difficult now with so many people delving into the crafting pool. Finding inspiration and making a design can be both fun and frustrating. I try to put a lot of thought behind each piece I design: will the person like it, what are their likes/dislikes, what are their favorite colors, and so much more. Personalization helps to make your designs unique. Finding a design source or images to use can be frustrating and with so many websites offering paid and free designs it can be overwhelming. 

Start with your Product and Work from There

I start with my substrate; whether it be a tumbler, pen, ornament, or t-shirt. The design needs to fit the medium you are applying it to. What looks good on a tumbler doesn’t necessarily work on a T-shirt. There are many aspects to what the finished product will be depending on the size your printer will print, the size of your application/heat devices.  This is generally the first consideration when I am starting a project. 

Some things to consider:

Finding Inspiration

Now it is time to find my “inspiration”, often people will request something specific and other times they may be vaguer. This is the point when I begin to do my research. I look at Facebook groups, Instagram, Pinterest, and google. 

There are many websites who also have pre-made designs if you are lacking inspiration. The MySawgrass design tool has many free designs and elements, but if you aren’t finding what you had in mind there are many other sites. Canva, Creative Fabrica, Jennifer Maker, Caluya Designs are just a few that offer free designs. Also, there are many file sharing Facebook groups for sublimation designs and ideas. You may browse hundreds of designs before deciding on the perfect one. 

Bringing it All Together

Once I have found my inspiration or designs I would like to use, it is time to bring it all together and add finishing touches but what platform should I use to personalize and complete my product design? I use the MySawgrass design tool and Canva to get the best results. The MySawgrass platform and is specifically designed to work with my Sawgrass printer and I find I get the best results even when importing PNG designs from other locations into the design tool. Canva is also great due to the fact I can save my designs in a PNG format and upload to the MySawgrass design tool or the Sawgrass Print Utility, the current print management tool created by Sawgrass. Making your design look its best can be tricky if you aren’t trained in graphic design; you need to work on placement, sizing, and visual appeal. Remember to measure your substrate or use a pre-loaded blank design in the design tool to get the best sizing. You want to add eye catching colors; remember the white area on sublimation blanks so considering your background is essential, add eye catching text and most importantly target the customer. 

MySawgrass not only offers designs to use, but elements as well.  The beauty of the MySawgrass design tool is much of the pre-loaded content is designed so that you can edit the colors in the images. This gives you the ability to customize the design to be your own and help it match with anything else you may be using or uploading into the program.

Creating Designs that Sell

Encouraging sales of your products can be hard, you need something unique that stands out from what others are trying to sell. You also need to know current trends; I try to keep up with the latest trends by following Facebook groups and browsing social media for ideas and trends.  Often times if your work stands out as quality work many people will come to you with requests and have designs in mind that you can work with. 

An easy way to expand your selling potential is to create a MySawgrass store.  You can post your items for sale and then you have share links to get your products in front of our customers. The best part?  If someone orders from your store, you are the producer as well and the order will be sent to you.  This feature is currently available in the US only, but it is a great way to create and produce while letting us handle the paperwork!

Final Tips

Sublimation is an awesome way to make custom products; practice and wasting blanks, paper and ink are all part of the learning curve. Finding groups on social media has been a huge help for me, because if I am having issues there is definitely someone else out there having the same issue and the crafting community is a great resource for support and encouragement. My suggestion is to keep a notebook with all the websites that offer designs, your measurements and times/temp you are using for each substrate. You will find your notebook will come in handy for future projects. Just remember this is crafting it is meant to be a source of relaxation and an outlet for your creativity. Just have fun and inspiration will come.

Good Luck and Happy Crafting! 

In the two years leading up to the release of the Sawgrass Print Utility, we spent extensive time in round tables with our users. We asked them not only what they liked and did not like in our existing print management solution, but also studied their workflow within the program.  Between that information and what we observed in technical support sessions, we know that many users were unsure of what options to choose and would often just print without changing any settings.

The Purpose of the Sawgrass Print Utility

The foundation of getting a good print from your Sawgrass SG500 or SG1000 is our print management software.  Color profiles have been built for every single combination of settings that can be chosen.  No matter your substrate, paper, or color preference, a color profile exists that will give you the proper output with great color.  Color profiling took many months and lots of tweaking to ensure that the results our customers achieve is unrivaled.  

There are other settings in the Sawgrass Print Utility that are equally as important.  Some products do not require mirroring before printing.  For heat transfer vinyl, you would print on the vinyl and the back of the vinyl is pressed to the product.  With acrylic and glass, you are pressing onto the back of the product and viewing it from the front, making it mirroring unnecessary.

The Power of Presets

One of the most important features that we added to the new print utility was Presets.  Located at the top of the Print Settings panel in the Sawgrass Print Utility the Presets menu includes a list of the most commonly used blanks for sublimation.  By choosing one of these, your settings automatically change to reflect settings for the best possible output.  This takes the guesswork out for our users. You need not worry if you’re making the right choices for the material you are using. We will change those settings for you.  

As a note, there are two job settings that you will need to check when using presets: Media Size and Media Type.  You will still need to choose your media size and your media type and match it to what you have loaded in your printer.  

Presets can be used even if your specific product isn’t mentioned. Just look for something that would be the same material.  For example, a canvas or linen pillowcase is going to be the similar to a canvas tote bag.  Any other fabric material is most likely going to be polyester, and would be the same settings as a t-shirt.  For many users, it would be easier to find a similar product and choose a preset than to do the settings on their own.  Less clicks too!  

That is our tech tip of the week!  Check out our blog and social media every Friday for new ways to get the most out of your Sawgrass system!  

One thing I can consistently hear from Sawgrass Users is a desire to save paper.  Often, I’ll be asked if you can cut the paper and then use the remainder for another job. While this works for vinyl cutters, it’s not the best solution for printers.  Using non-standard size paper in any printer can cause jams.  But you have nothing to fear – there is functionality in the Sawgrass Print Utility to help you simplify the process of putting multiple designs on your sublimation transfer paper. 

Ways to Send to Sawgrass Print Utility

There are four different ways to send files to the Sawgrass Print Utility:

As a reminder, you will configure your settings for those last two options in the Sawgrass Print Utility before sending your files.  With both Send to Sawgrass Print Utility and Quick Print Folders, you can enable AutoPrint so your files go to the printer with your settings while skipping the extra step of the jobs opening in the Sawgrass Print Utility.  You will need to disable that so your files will open in Sawgrass Print Utility for what we’re working on today:  Ganging and Nesting.

Understanding Ganging & Nesting

These big words have very simple definitions:  Nesting is when you combine multiples of the same image on your page; ganging happens when you use several different images to fill your paper.  

Nesting

We’ll start with Nesting.  For this example, I’ve added a design by clicking Create.  By default, your first image is going to be in the top left corner.  It will be moved in far enough from the corner so that it fits within the margins of the printer.  If you need more room around the image, you can go down to your print settings and center the image on the page.  With multiples, it is fine to start in the top left corner.

One very important thing to discuss is the size of your image.  When you bring in a design, it is going to respect the canvas from the original document.  For example, if you created something on a canvas that is 9”x4”, it is going to reflect that as the size, even if your actual design is only 3”x 5”.  The extra area around your actual image can be removed by clicking the “crop to image area” button.  This is very helpful with ganging and nesting.

To add more copies of this design, I’ll just go to repeat and increase the number.  You can manually enter the number or use the up arrow.  Now that our images are on the page, let’s add more space between them to make sublimating them easier.  In our Design Files area, you’ll adjust the spacing.  As we saw with adding copies, you can type in a number or use the up arrow.  It should be noted that space is being added to the right and bottom of each image.  This gives you more accurate spacing.  

Once you have your page setup, you can hit print.  If you needed more copies of an image than what you are seeing on your page, you can use your page options at the bottom of the job settings.  Let’s say I actually needed thirty of this image.  I can just increase the number of copies.  Note that in this case, you’re not increasing the number of images, but of complete pages. 

Ganging

Ganging is going to similar, but there are a few differences we need to point out.  We’ll start with an example where we drop our images into our Quick print folder on our desktop.  As you’ll see both images drop into the same Sawgrass Print Utility tab.  You’ll see that both files are in the Design Files section and you have an arrow you can use to collapse or expand the jobs as you’re working with both.  If you needed multiples of any of your designs, you can still change that under repeat.  You can also change the spacing on each design, or by clicking the button for “space all items simultaneously,” you’ll get a box where you can add the spacing to all images on your page.  

To maximize space on your paper, you can also rotate your image to increase the number that fit on a page.  If you are doing multiples of a single design, you’ll see that all copies rotate.  

If you are ganging multiple images, you can add new projects to the page with the add button.  The Add button opens a finder window so you can grab files on your computer.  You’ll notice that if you select multiple files, they will all be added to your project.  This is a great time saver when grabbing multiple files!  

When sending jobs from the MySawgrass design tool to Sawgrass Print Utility, each job will open a new tab.  In the Design Files area of the Sawgrass Print Utility, choose one of your jobs from the “Select a Job” list and then select “Merge into Tab.”  This will combine your jobs into the same tab and you’ll be able to adjust your spacing and rotate as needed to get the best fit.

That’s the basics on ganging and nesting.  If you have any issues or questions, please reach out to our support team at care.sawgrassink.com.  See you next time!

Skill Level: Intermediate

Tools & Supplies to Make It:

How to Create It:

How to Print It:

How to Press It:

Tips & Tricks:

Skill Level: Basic

Tools & Supplies to Make It:

How to Create It:

How to Print It:

How to Press It:

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