February 27, 2018

Making Signs with Cricut

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I’ve been redoing my laundry room for the last couple weeks. It’s a slow process because I’m trying to spread out cost of supplies and I’m doing all the work my self. Everything from taking down cabinets, to hanging new ones, to making the new shelves. Hopefully I’ll be finished soon to share the final project soon and can’t wait to share the whole transformation. Here’s a picture of what I started with and my inspiration picture.

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If you want to see some of the progress so far you can follow on my Instagram page.

In addition to the cabinets and shelves I wanted to make some decorations for the walls and shelves. We park in the garage so I always enter the house through the laundry room so I wanted to make a sign to go on the wall. It would go straight ahead of the doorway and be the first thing you’d see. My idea was to make a welcome sign. One option I saw on another blog was one that says “It’s so good to be home,” because it encompasses my feelings of being home. I worked on making one as a printable but I wasn’t loving it.

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That’s when I turned to my trusty Cricut. If you haven’t heard of Cricut, it’s a machine that makes crafting a breeze. It cuts everything from paper to thin wood. It has software that lets you design all kinds of things. It then cuts out all the pieces for you and all you have to do it put the craft together. I have used it to make banners, picture frames, cards, and most often stencils for screen printing shirts. The most recent upgraded machine the Cricut Maker comes with the attachment to cut material for sewing patterns. I haven’t tried it out yet but it sounds like it would make sewing a breeze! Some day I’ll upgrade, I hope.

Today I used the Design Center to make my sign with the help of a few supplies: the cricut cutting mat, Vinyl, transfer tape, and tools. There’s a lot of options when it comes to every aspect of Cricut supplies. For this project I used the basic vinyl because I wasn’t adding it to clothing or any type of glass or ceramic that will be handled a lot. It was going in a picture frame.

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I opened Design space and found a template for the perfect sign. It was a little different then the one I had originally thought of making. This one said “Home Sweet Home” and had cute little house with a heart inside in the corner. I loved that for also standing for home is where the heart is, which is another favorite saying of mine.

In Design Space you have two option, you can pay a monthly access fee to be able to use everything is the software. It a deal if you craft a lot, because it also give you a discount of supplies and other machines in the cricut family. If you don’t craft all the time you certainly don’t have to pay monthly, you can just pay ala cart for what you use. In design space if you search for “home” you will see the sign I am making in the second row.

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Once you choose your project you can either go straight to cutting or you can customize. Make sure you customize, because you need to make sure that you make the parameters fit your frame. I didn’t measure the first time just went with the frame measurements and that didn’t take into account the matting in the frame. You guessed it- It was too big and I had to redo it. Not a big deal, but it uses up more vinyl unnecessarily.

When you are on the screen to customize you can drag the corners to change the size. Doing that will change the height and width together. If you need to make specific measurements, click the lock in the lower left corner of the image. That will let you choose the height and width that works for your frame.

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When you have the sizing correct, the next step is to get the mat and set up for cutting. They vinyl I had was on a roll so I fist had to cut it to the correct width. After that you just press it face up onto your cutting mat. There are different strengths of mats. The strength means how sticky the adhesive is. I have always used Standard Grip. I’ve never had a problem with it being strong enough. A few times when cutting regular sheets of paper it was too strong and hard to peel off. You can purchase the Light Grip mats, but I just keep my older ones to use for light weight projects.

Once you have the vinyl in place on the mat (make sure you always place it starting in the upper left corner) place the mat face up into the cricut. Nextpress the double arrow to have the machine grip the mat. Turn the dial to any of the dots in the Vinyl area of the ring. Once everything is set go ahead and click “Make It” in design space. When everything is ready to go the Cricut button will start blinking on the machine. Press it to start cutting.

Once cutting is finished, press the Cricut button again to release you mat from the machine. Now come the fun part, weeding. Weeding is when you remove all excess vinyl so you are left with just the words you want to use for your project. This is where the tools come in handy because it can be hard to get all the nooks and crannies with just your fingers.

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When you are left with just what you need for your sign you are ready for the transfer tape. When I first got my Cricut I wasn’t convinced I needed transfer tape. I figure I could just move everything over by hand individually. The problem with that is making sure you line everything up correctly. What the transfer tape does is keep everything in place while you transfer it to your final canvas type. In this instance I was just putting it on a piece of white card stock.

  • Here’s a tip: While transfer tape isn’t super expensive it is basically the same thing as contact paper. With contact paper you get 9 feet for the price of the Cricut brand which only gives you 4 feet.

When using the transfer tape you just press it down on top of your image, sticky side down. Next pull the vinyl backing off so now your vinyl image is on the transfer tape (you will need to use the tools to help separate the vinyl and backing).

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The final step is to press the image down onto the card stock paper and then remove the transfer tape. This step is almost identical to the previous step. What you are left with is your image ready to go into your frame!

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What you’re left with finally is your picture that is ready to be framed. One thing I’d like to point out is that I could have made this with card stock, but I choose to use the vinyl for convince. It’s not the type of project that is usually done with vinyl however the alternative would have been to try and glue everything in place. The vinyl was already sticky and all I had to do was press it together with the white card stock. My final product looked like this:

 

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It’s ready to be hung up and welcome us home for years to come. I have a few more decorations to make and a counter top still to install. Then the room will be ready for it’s final reveal!

Do you love crafting? What items do you use to make creating easier? Anything you’ve been wanting to make that’d you’d like to see a tutorial on? Let us know Below. 

 

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