Easy Jack Skellington Light - Housewife Eclectic

This time of year, everything in our house is The Nightmare Before Christmas. We can’t get enough of Jack Skellington and his spooky friends. A couple of years ago, we were walking through IKEA when my daughter pointed to a FADO lamp and said “Mom, look, Jack! Ever since then, I have had this project idea in the back of my mind. I finally made it happen this year and I am absolutely in love with how it turned out.

You will need:

a white Fado Lamp from IKEA
Black Vinyl
A way to cut the vinyl (I used my Cricut Maker)

These FADO lamps make the perfect base. They run about $25 at IKEA currently, which isn’t a bad price for a huge lamp.

Beginner? No worries! Start here: A Beginner’s Guide to Crafting With Cricut to learn some basics. I will walk you through how to make this particular project below. The first thing you will want to do is right-click the image above and save it to your desktop so you can find it in the next steps.

When you open the new Cricut Design Space, it will look like the photo above. The top banner will be followed by projects that you have created. You can see some of my latest projects like the cat shoes, I just made for my little one. Below your projects will be Make It Now Projects, a fun variety of predesigned projects that are great when you are looking for something cute and fast to make. To get started in the New Cricut Design Space, hit the plus sign on the left-hand side of your projects.

After you select New Project, a blank canvas will open up for you. The canvas is a grid, so you will be able to see exactly how big your project is. Each of the little squares is an inch. To upload our Jack Skellington Image to Cricut DesignSpace, hit the upload button at the bottom of the left-hand menu. You can either drag and drop your file on the next screen or search for it on your computer by hitting the browse button.

Once you have selected your image, it will pop up in the box on the left-hand part of your screen. Select what kind of image it is, a simple image is an image with high contrast colors and a transparent or blank background. A moderately complex image is one with simple details and colors. A complex image is one with lots of details and low contrast. Our Jack Skellington is a simple image because of the white background and the dark, simple lines.

The next screen will pop up, wanting your to erase any parts of your image that you don’t want in the final product. This is when you erase backgrounds and other objects. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can do it the magic wand (it looks like a plus sign on your screen) will try and select the parts you want erased or you can use the eraser (it looks like a circle on your screen) which functions the same way the eraser tool in old school paint did. This Jack Skellington Design is so simple, you should be able to grab the magic wand and just click on the background once.

Save your image as a cut file and then insert it into your design. You will need to resize your image to be about inches wide. This is the perfect size to fit on the lamp.

Cut our your black vinyl, shiny side up on your mat, using the vinyl setting and the fine point blade. Weed off the excess, by peeling a corner and taking away the negative parts of the vinyl.

It may be helpful to have scissors and to make a few tiny little cuts in the eyes, to get them to lay flat on the large round surface.

The pieces of this project are so large, that I didn’t use transfer tape. I just peeled them up and use them as a sticker. I did slit my eyes, about halfway in to help them curve around the lamp. I made sure that each of the slits overlapped so that no light would peek through.

I just eyeballed my placement, but make sure you place the lamp back on the ground several times while you work, so you can make sure that your face isn’t too far down to be seen. Smooth down the vinyl and that is it!