Arthur Library Card Shirt

 

There are few things we love more than books in our house. To get my kids excited for the new school year, we went through and made a bunch of fun reading shirts using different techniques in Cricut Design Space. This was the first one I made using a quote from the PBS show Arthur. My daughter loves it and it was so easy! I made it using the slice tool in Design Space which I will walk you through.

Arthur Library Card Shirt

For this project you will need:

• a blank shirt
• Glitter Iron-on in blue
• a Cricut
• Cricut EasyPress or Iron
• Cricut Brightpad

To make life really easy, you can find my cut files here.  Follow the instruction below for resizing or creating from scratch.

 

Open up and sign into Cricut Design Space. Your screen will look similar to the above. There will be a top banner, followed by a banner of your latest projects. You can see some of my most recent projects on the screen above. Below that will be the Make it Now projects. Hit the green plus sign next your projects to get started.

Using Cricut Images

Your new project will open up for you as a blank grid. Click on the images tab on the left-hand side of the screen to start this project. First search for books in the top right corner search bar. Select the book with the green background on the second row and insert it into your project.

 

 

Add text by hitting the text button in the far left menu. A text box will pop up and you can type what you want the project to say. For this project, you will type Having Fun Isn’t Hard in one text box and When You Have A Library Card in another.

Resizing

Once you have inserted the text into your project you can resize it and move it around. Resize the image by clicking and dragging on the double arrow symbol that appears when you have the image selected. There is also size box at the top of the screen that lists how big the text or image is, you can adjust the width and height here if you don’t want to manually toggle the blue arrow key.

 

 

 

Resize your image until it is the size you want it to be on the shirt. For my 4-year-old, my book image is about 6 inches wide. Then resize the text so it fits over the top of the book image.

Slice Tool

You will now use the slice tool to take cut the words out of the image. Select both the words and the image and select slice in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Pull the text off of your image and you still see the letters have now cut through the image. Grab the letters again and pull the second set off as well. Now your Cricut will cut the words out of the image.

When your project looks the way you want it, it the Make It button in the top right corner of the screen. Hit the mirror image button on the right-hand side, your project will flip on the screen and look backward.

 

Place the Iron on shiny side down onto your Cricut mat and then load your mat into your machine, spin the dial to iron-on and hit the flashing Cricut button.

 

Weeding

 

Peel the heat transfer off of your mat and then weed (peel apart) the iron on until just your design remains on the sticky backing.

EasyPress

Heat your iron up to the hottest setting or you EasyPress to 305 degrees. Place the design sticky side down onto your shirt. Iron straight onto the plastic, making sure each element of the design gets 30 seconds of pressure and hit. Start pulling up the plastic backing and if any of the elements pull up at all, put the plastic back down and iron that area again. Peel the plastic off and your shirt is ready to wear!

Is there a book lover in your life that would love this shirt?