Personalizing With Vinyl {A Beginners Tutorial}

*This post is sponsored by Craftey.

My oldest daughter and I have a daily workout routine. Every afternoon we moan and groan through 30 minutes of hardcore booty toning. Gotta get these winter bods ready for summer, #amiright? 😉  Now that the weather is getting warmer we plan to start adding in walking/running for some extra cardio. Being the girly girls that we are, we must run in style, so I added our names to some cute water bottles using a sheet of adhesive vinyl. Today, I’m showing you how easy it is to personalize anything!

Gather up the following:

Step One: Set Up Designs in Cricut Design Space

(1) Click the TEXT button on the left of the Design Space window.

(2) Type your word in the popup text box.

(3) Select your font in the top left corner. For this project, I’m using the font Willabong.

(4) Adjust the letter spacing. Typically, words look best when the spacing is set to zero.

(5) Select all and click weld. This keeps the letters from cutting separately and instead cuts the entire word as one piece.

You can see in the screenshot above that the word Kayla is correctly spaced, welded and ready to be cut.

Now, resize the design to fit the water bottle. My bottle is 9 inches tall so I set the width of my word to 7 inches. This will allow me to center the word on the bottle with about an inch of blank space on either side.

Step Two: Load Material and Cut

Stick the vinyl to the cutting mat with the glossy side facing up and load the mat into the machine. The software will prompt you to press the flashing GO button then the machine will begin cutting.

Step Three: Weeding

Once the cutting is complete unload the mat and remove the sheet of vinyl. Cut the design away from the sheet of vinyl using scissors.

Use a weeding tool or something similar to weed away the negative areas.

Step Four: Apply Transfer Tape

Cut a piece of transfer tape to fit over the design then use the scraper tool to burnish over the design and ensure it completely adheres to the transfer tape.

Step Five: Transfer Design

Peel the transfer tape away from the vinyl backing and apply the decal to your water bottle (or anything!) using the scraper tool again to burnish really well over the design.

Step Six: Remove Transfer Tape

Peel away the transfer tape and enjoy! Remember it’s always best to handwash items with vinyl decals. It prolongs the life of the adhesive!

Thank you to Craftey for sponsoring this post! Craftey is a community website where you can go to learn all of the tips and tricks to get you up and running or get inspiration for your next project. Click here to visit the Craftey website and join in on the crafty fun!

 

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