Cricut Tutorial For Beginners – Easy Vinyl Letter Wedding Tile

Want to learn how to use a Cricut? Intimidated by the thought of learning new software? Want to make some easy homemade wedding gifts, birthday presents, or just decorate your home? This Cricut Tutorial for Beginners takes you through an easy wedding gift project that is great for beginners or those who are unsure about using the design software.

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Cricut Tutorial For Beginners

I will walk you through each step of this easy homemade wedding gift (but it also makes a great housewarming, birthday, Christmas, or even a fun Valentine’s Day gift as well!) and you’ll see just how easy it is to learn and use the Cricut Design Space software!

Want something even simpler to start? Check out my Getting Started With A Cricut Explore Air – First Project Ideas post and get a very easy project under your belt in no time!

Tile with Vinyl Lettering – Tutorial

Materials Needed

Cricut Cutting Machine (I have the Explore Air, but the new Maker is fantastic!)
Cricut Vinyl in color of choice
Cricut Standard Grip Mat (Green)
Essential Tool Kit
Cricut Transfer Tape (be sure you don’t get strong grip)
Ceramic or Porcelean Tile (grab one from your local hardware store)

Start Your Project

If you have not used Design Space before, the first thing to do is head over to Cricut and click on Cricut Design Space in the upper right. Bookmark this page, or save to your desktop. You’ll be headed here a lot. 🙂

Here you can browse the available ‘ready-to-make’ projects, or click on Create New Project. This is what we will be doing today for our easy wedding gift project. 

Add Heart Text

Once in Design Space, you will need to simply add some text using the MF I Love Glitter font (click here to see how to easily install custom fonts to your computer). 

Type your desired text (swap to the EDIT tab to change fonts). With the MF I Love Glitter font, you can add a custom swirl by using the ‘[‘ and ‘]’ bracket keys respectively on each end. You can add the heart in the middle by using the ‘_’ key (underscore). 

Once you have the text you would like, you need to ungroup the letters to adjust them individually. With any script font you want the letters to touch each other so it looks like someone wrote it in cursive. It is much easier to do this in the design software versus trying to place each individual letter on your project.

Ungroup

Click back over to the LAYERS tab and on the bottom right you will see a UNGROUP button. Click that. Your letters will now all be separated (if at any time you make a mistake during your design process, simply hit the undo arrow up on top). 

Adjust each letter so that it just touches the next letter as you will be welding these all together. 

Weld

After you have them all set close together, drag your cursor over the entire thing to select all. The WELD option should appear in the layers tab. Click Weld.

If everything worked out correctly, you will have one image in the layers tab. If you have more than one image layer showing, some pieces were not close enough. Take a look at which ones they are, move them a bit closer and try the weld again. You may need to make a few adjustments until you get it just right.

Note: If you have e’s in your lettering and the circle part keeps filling in, try moving the adjoining letters a little further away (undo, move, weld) until it stops filling in the center.

Add ‘Established In’ Text

You have creative liberty with how to do this, but you are simply adding more text of your choice (if you have a Cricut Access subscription, anything with the green a next to it is included in your subscription). 

I chose to use the abbreviated version of established as Est. 2007, however, you can write the word out in full if you prefer. 

Resizing

The last thing left for your design is to decide on the overall size. This will be determined by the size of the tile or wood that you are adhering it to. I did mine on a 6″ x 18″ tile so I chose to make the length just under 18″ and the height appropriate for the size of the lettering, in my case about 2″ tall. 

If you prefer to adjust the height of your letters separately from the length, you simply need to click on the little lock symbol on the lower left side of any selected image/text. Once unlocked the sizes can be adjusted individually. Once you have it where you want it, click it again to lock it in place.

Finally, I simply move the text around on the design mat so I can have a rough idea of what the final project will look like. I kept everything within the 6″ x 18″ parameters of my tile.

Colors

While it is not necessary to change the colors within the design itself since the colors will simply be whatever vinyl you choose to cut, sometimes it is helpful to see those colors on the screen before you actually cut them.

To change any font color simply select the text, click on the thumbnail of that text/image in the layers tab, and an ATTRIBUTES tab will pop open to give you more options.

I decided to try out a maroon color for this gift, however, I may go with more of a coastal feel to match our Hawaiian Wedding for my own tile. 

Cutting Your Design

What I like to do in order to save on wasted material is to attach my pieces together so they both cut on the same pass (don’t do this if you will be using different colors for each part of your design). 

To attach, simply select all, then click ATTACH on the layers tab. 

Place your vinyl on your Cricut Mat. I like to use the 12×24 mat for this size project. Load the mat into your Cricut Cutting Machine, and set the dial (on a Cricut Explore Air) to Vinyl or choose the appropriate cut setting in Design Space if you are using a Maker. 

Hit GO in Design Space and follow the prompts. Once your machine has finished cutting unload the mat, remove the vinyl from the mat, and weed any unwanted pieces away.

Weeding

Weeding is simply removing the excess vinyl that doesn’t belong in your design. I typically remove my vinyl from my cutting mat, cut it down to size if necessary (if I haven’t already cut the vinyl to size prior to placing on the mat), then peel up the large pieces and carefully remove any little pieces using my Cricut Tools.

Once you have your design ready to go you can transfer it to your tile.

Transferring Vinyl

To make transferring the vinyl as easy as possible, I typically cut some of the Cricut Transfer Tape to the same size as my project, place it over the vinyl and press down firmly with my scraper tool, then peel the vinyl off the backing and place it on the tile.

Once you have your vinyl placed where you would like, press down firmly with a scraper tool and very carefully pull up the transfer tape. 

Repeat this process for the Established in 2017 piece as well. 

Finished Product

There you have it! A beautiful and heartfelt gift that anyone is sure to love.

More Easy Cricut Projects

If you found this Cricut Tutorial for Beginners too complex, jump over to my  Getting Started With A Cricut Explore Air – First Project Ideas post and get a very easy project under your belt, then come back and give this a try!

Find all of my Cricut Tutorials here: Cricut Tutorials

 
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This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.