Getting to Work - Starting Small

Finally, I have gathered my supplies and I have spent plenty of time on YouTube and Pinterest watching others create. This week it was my turn to try out making some projects. Since I am relatively new to the Cricut world, I wanted to work on some smaller projects this week before tackling some more difficult ones next week.

While at Dollarama last week, I noticed they had tons of cute glassware, so I picked up a couple glass mugs and stemless wine glasses. I have a few friends birthdays coming up and I figured that this was the perfect time to test out my crafting abilities as I don't want to waste anything I make but I know my first products may not be perfect enough to sell! I started with the wine glass as I thought it would be the simplest and decided to put my friends name on the glass in a cute cursive font that I downloaded from DaFont.com. Luckily, I have made a couple of simple projects with my Cricut before so I know how to use the Cricut design space and how to download new fonts to my laptop. However, if I had to learn those things in addition to the other information I have had to gather, this would be a much more challenging task. The wine glass was the first "rounded" surface I had ever worked on and when I first laid the name down on the cup, it did not go as planned....it bubbled up and would not flatten properly against the cup. Honestly, it looked terrible - there was no way I'd give it as a gift to my friend, never mind expect someone to pay for it. I googled how to avoid this issue and found a tip that recommended putting a small cut in each side of the transfer tape. 

(For those not familiar a Cricut is basically a cutting machine used to create crafts. I am using it to cut permanent vinyl and transfer tape is basically sticky paper or vinyl like material that you use to transfer an adhesive vinyl decal to your surface)

Once I tried this tip the cup turned out perfectly! Here is a picture of it:

Since that went so well, after a little bit of trial and error, I made a couple more and even worked on a mug. I think that they all turned out so cute and I cannot wait to try out some bigger, more advanced projects next week! While it did get frustrating at times when things did not go perfectly, I am learning to be patient and to trouble shoot issues and I am very happy with the results so far. Check out more photos of what I made this week: