What Tools Are Needed For Hat Burning?

Hat burning is a fun and creative activity for crafters. In this article, we discuss what tools are needed to burn hats.

The tools needed for hat burning include: a variable heat soldering iron is essential. Some other handy tools are tracing or carbon paper, parchment paper, a small iron, a tool for picking, and heat erase pens.

Let’s take a quick dive into what you need to create stunning burned hat

A heat adjustable soldering iron. To burn hats you must have a soldering iron. A typical soldering iron can reach 900 degrees or more. That’s great for soldering wires, but it is too hot for hat burning unless the user has a lot of experience. A better solution is a variable heat soldering iron. We typically burn a hat with a temperature setting of 300 to 400 degrees. 

While you can spend $200 or more on a variable heat soldering iron, the one we use cost us less than $30. 

When shopping for a variable heat soldering iron look for a temperature setting ability of 250 degrees and up. And make sure it has plenty of tips. At a minimum, you’ll want a heavy tip for outlining and filling shapes, and you’ll want a medium tip for shading or creating light weight outlines. 

Tracing Paper/Carbon Paper. Whether you draw your own design or use one of our designs, you’ll want to transfer your design to a hat. There are a variety of methods of transferring the design. Our tutorial Transferring a Design Our Method is a good place to learn about design transfers. In the tutorial we cover how we use parchment paper to transfer our

A Small Iron. Getting the design to transfer into tight places or to touch up an area that didn’t completely transfer is easily done with a mini iron. 

A Picking Tool. One method of hat burning is to burn the design directly through the printed design and onto the hat. With this method, fragments of the burned paper will often stick to the hat. Those will have to be removed from the hat. A picking too or pair of tweezers is perfect to clean up the

Heat Erase Pens. When touching up a design, it’s often nice to be able to draw in areas or partial designs that didn’t transfer. Heat erase pens for fabric are a perfect solution. 

Be sure to read the description and reviews. Some pens are reported to leave ghost marks or shadows if the area is reheated or exposed to heat like sunlight.

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