Here’s a twist for my blog topics. I have never been much of a crafter. I’m more likely to build something or even sew something. But my sister gave me a Cricut Explore machine and I have been learning how to use it. She visited for the holiday so I wanted to create a project with the machine. I’ve been buying reusable napkins for celebrations like birthday parties. It may not be much of a reduction in materials but at least uses fewer throw away paper products. All of the materials for these napkins I already had on hand. I was using up some scraps and materials that I purchased for former projects.
There are some tricks to the tools the Cricut has for creating designs. I pretty much mastered lettering for birthday party and holiday iron ons. A text box comes in with all the letters in a group but in order to move each letter the text must be selected and ungrouped. In a script font it’s best for each letter to touch the next. Then once the letters are perfectly placed they are grouped again by selecting them all with a box drawn by the cursor and the weld tool will make the letters flow together and uneditable so it stays together. In this case I wanted the T attached to the rest of the word so I used hearts to combine them. The other two hearts were for balance.
A page of these words was created in the Design Space application to cut out a dozen from iron on Cricut material. I learned that once the page layout is created it is best to select them all and use the attach tool otherwise the Cricut may move them all over the cut page.
I have a heat press for the iron on material. When transferring to multiple items it works better than an iron. The correct temperature can be set and a timer stops the heat after the necessary duration.
We made a dozen napkins for our dinner then thought about custom napkin rings. I had never used the Cricut drawing pen function before. The Cricut allows for layers in an image to be treated differently. Normally svg type files are used for this but I have been unsuccessful saving png to svg’s that work in layers on the Cricut. It occurred to me that I could use the same image twice. One as just the outline to be cut and the other on top of it to be drawn. I erased the inside lines on one image to create just the outline to be cut and imported both images.
Selecting each image as a layer in the Cricut design space allowed me to mark one as Draw and the other as Cut. Then I put several on one page and used off white card stock to draw them and cut them out.
We cut the inner roll from the Cricut iron on material into 1/2″ rounds to attach the ribbon and turkeys. I have glue dots which work better for easy stick ons than hot glue. Cricut makes these projects fun and relatively easy and there is always something more to learn to use on the machine. We had these customized napkins for our Thanksgiving dinner.
We did a second Cricut craft while my sister was visiting. She suggested I make a luggage tag for each member of our family who will be visiting during the Christmas vacation. We are taking a short trip together and it will be fun to have a small memento. We found some simple ornaments at Target for $1 each and I labeled them with Cricut adhesive vinyl cut outs. I didn’t keep the letters even when sticking them onto the metal. I should have used the vinyl transfer paper that Cricut suggests for projects like this. Next time I may remember.
