Tuesday, February 15, 2011

{crafty} Warning: Vinyl can be addicting

I have been wanting to try cutting vinyl on my Cricut for quite some time now but never wanted to pay the $10 for Cricut vinyl. A friend of mine told me about a site called CraftVinyl.com and I'm so glad she did! I ended up purchasing a grab bag of 25 12x12 sheets, which is cut from the same vinyl Cricut uses, for $25 including shipping. If I had bought the same amount in the Cricut branded vinyl I would have spent $60 and only gotten 4 colors.

As soon as I got my vinyl I knew immediately what I wanted to do; my laptop needed a makeover!

I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to put on it, but I grabbed my Gypsy and ended up looking at the Cindy Loo cartridge. I loved "tree1" but thought it was a little bare, so I started adding more branches and leaves to it and grouped & welded everything together. I sized it at 12x11 (lots of negative surrounding space) and cut it out in paper first to see how it fit on my laptop. Then I decided I needed some birds to go along with it. I cut the bird, also from Cindy Loo, at 1" 1.3" 1.5" and 2" and again cut them on paper to see how everything worked together before cutting the vinyl.

I chose this gorgeous blue color and cut away! I set my blade depth to 5 and pressure to 4 and it cut perfectly. I cut down 5 separate pieces of transfer paper so I could line up each individual image exactly where I wanted it.

You could easily do separate layers in different colors as well, but for this purpose I really like the all one color look.

Now, as soon as my husband saw this he told me the birds look like fish. Of course, now thats all I can see when I look at it! I suppose it could be an underwater tree ;-)


Now I have many other ideas for vinyl! Hopefully I will have more new projects to share soon.

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