Joy's Life

Posted by superjoy on December 13th, 2009 in Cricut, Home Decoration, How to, crafting, vinyl

I created this vinyl greeting and holly for my front and back door transoms!

This post will be photo heavy and writing light…at least I hope so because I’m eager to see if DH’s world famous steaks are ready yet!

First, I created the Merry Christmas sentiment using Lyrical Letters and welded it with my Gypsy.  You could use Design Studio to do this too.  I made my design almost 2 feet long, so I used my 12×24 Cricut cutting mat.

Next, I laid my vinyl out on my 12×24 mat.  Do you like that quilt?  It’s “A Christmas Carol” themed.  I love it!  I bought my vinyl from Oh My Crafts.  It comes in 2 – 12″x24″ sheets.  So, it fit perfectly!  Easy is so welcome this time of year.

I cut this vinyl backwards so I could apply it to the inside of my back door.  It looks better if you put it on the outside,  so that’s what I did when I cut vinyl for the front door.  Hey, everything is a learning experience!   Remember when I told you about weeding vinyl? Well, below I’ve done that again.  Removing the excess vinyl is called weeding.  You can just peel it up and pull it off with your fingers, but go slow”ish”.  This isn’t like removing a band-aid really fast or anything.  Keep scissors or a razor nearby for cutting away vinyl if you find yourself in a sticky mess.

In my last vinyl post about snowflakes for my back door, I didn’t use transfer tape.  I put each snowflake on after pulling it straight from the mat.  That wouldn’t be the easiest way to adhere long lettering like this, so I used transfer tape.  You put the sticky side down over the vinyl after you weed it, peeling off the grid paper backing.

This is the transfer tape all laid out over the lettering.  Now I can peel it all up and stick it to my transom.  Yay!  I used that craft/razor blade thing to cut the transfer tape between the two words so I could apply them separately.  Use the craft stick to get the transfer tape stuck down to the vinyl really well.  Some people have used clear contact paper as transfer tape, but I haven’t tried that.   Mine is by Cricut and I also bought some from Oh My Crafts.com.

I also made this cutie little holly sprig using the Joys of the Season cartridge .  I LOVE the way it turned out.  I used brown, green and red vinyl to create this multi-layer.  I just put each layer on the other until it was complete.

Here’s one door that I did.  I had not applied the holly at this point.  Also, I was standing in pouring rain to get this photo, so that’s why everything looks like it’s melting.

Here’s part of the other door I did.  On this door, I applied the vinyl to the outside.

Here’s a better picture of the final product.  I really like it!!

Last bit of info…

I cut everything with my Speed set to 3, Pressure set to 3 and my Blade at 4. That worked well for the 2 different shades of Oh My Crafts red vinyl that I used.  (My back and front door are different reds because I had a little mishap with one of my cuts). However, the brown and green OMC vinyl that I used was cut too deep at that blade setting and at times it was tricky getting the vinyl to separate because the paper was separating instead.  If you have that problem, try lowering either the blade level or the pressure.

Go Vinyl Something!!