How to Cut Thermoflex Plus HTV with a Silhouette Cameo 4

ThermoFlex Plus HTV is offered in 12", 15", 20", and 30" widths. You can cut Thermoflex htv with most standard vinyl cutters including Cricut Maker, Graphtec, Silhouette Cameo 3, and Silhouette Cameo 4. In this blog, we are going to go over Thermoflex cutting instructions for a Silhouette Cameo 4.

First, you are going to want to load your Silhouette Cameo. If you are using a 12 x 12 sheet, you can use the cutting mat that comes with your cutter, but if you are using a roll of htv, you can load your vinyl directly into the Cameo without using the mat. To do that, you will use the roll feeder in the front!

Make sure you load your vinyl with the correct side facing upward. You want the liner side to be down. For Thermoflex, the liner is the shiny side, so that should be facing down. 

To load your vinyl, you will need to have this lever turned out of the upright position, like so.

Then, you will put your vinyl under both of the side pinch rollers and move the lever back to the upright position. After that, press the up arrow to make the rollers grab your vinyl and move it forward, in preparation for cutting. Your vinyl should look like this with the end of your vinyl underneath the roller, and the side lever in the upright position.

Now you are ready to cut your design! Make sure you have the right selections for media size and whether or not you are using a cutting mat. For this example, we are using a yarder of orange Thermoflex, which can range from 11.8" to 12". We measured our roll, and it was 11.8" so our dimensions are 11.8” by 36”.

After that, go to the “send” tab in the upper right corner of the screen. There, you will double check your settings to make sure the force, speed, size, etc. are all correct. For Thermoflex Plus, we set our speed to 8 and our force to 6.

We ALWAYS do a test cut before cutting our whole design, to make sure our settings are correct. Blades can change over time, so it is important to test a corner before fully committing to cutting your design. To do a test cut, you simply press the test button near the bottom of your screen on the right side.

Once your test cut is complete, weed it with your weeding tool. Then, it is time to cut your design. Press send on the bottom right of your screen, and watch the Silhouette Cameo work it’s magic! This is the design we cut, but first we had to mirror our design. To do that, you right click on your image, then select “flip horizontally”.

And this is how it looked after we cut and weeded our design!

The picture on the left shows the vinyl side that we cut in our Silhouette Cameo 4. The white side is the side that will go onto our garment. The right photo shows the vinyl through the liner! This is what the design will look like after we press it to our shirt.