Every year, Buddy the Elf grows on me a little bit more. My kids absolutely adore the movie Elf and the charming and sweet adult sized Elf that comes with it. They quote it often and last year I made them shirts with two of their favorite sayings from the movie. This year, they are a little bigger and have new favorite Elf quotes and so they needed new Elf shirts to go along with them! I love these shirts so much even more than last years! They are both easy to make with just a few colors of iron on. I walk you through the entire process below.
Bye Buddy, Hope You Find Your Dad Shirt
For this project you will need:
- a blank white shirt
- red heat transfer
- black heat transfer
- light green heat transfer
- dark green heat transfer
- white heat transfer
- a Cricut
- Cricut EasyPress
- Cricut Brightpad
For an even easier project, find my design files here.
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. It will show your most recent projects, you can see that my most recent projects are The Harry Potter Merry Hallows shirts and these Christmas shirts inspired by the movie Elf. Below your projects will be Ready to Make 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 or the green New Project button in the top right corner.
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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. For this project we will be using Cricut’s predesigned images and adding our own text underneath each of the images.
Select the image button on the left hand menu bar. It will bring up a screen like the one above. In the top right hand corner of the image screen you will see a search bar. Type what you are looking for into the search bar.
You can see that each of the images has a price listed and if the image is included in the Cricut Access subscription. Cricut Access is a monthly subscription that lets you use all of the fonts and images in the access library. Since we are using all Access images and fonts with this shirt, if you had the subscription they would all be free to use. If a image is included in the subscription, you will see a little green A right by the image. Select the image you want and then hit insert in the bottom right hand corner. This will add this image to your canvas. For this particular project, I searched for a Narwhal image and added it to my canvas.
Once you have inserted the image 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. If you want to more accurately resize objects, you can type the dimensions in the bar that will appear at the top of the screen when you have an image selected. I resized my Narwhal to be about 7 inches wide.
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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. Type Bye Buddy in one box, select the box and you will be able to resize the words and change the font if you want Then repeat this process for the “I Hope You Find Your Dad” line.
One of my favorite features of Cricut Design Space is that when you change the colors of elements in the layers pallet, the program will assume that you want to cut those items out of a different kind of material. To change the colors of something, go over to the far right side and find the element you want to change. For text boxes, they are usually represented by the first letter in the line of text. For images, if will show a small version of the image. Click on the colored black dot and a color menu will pop up and you can change it to another color. Change the colors of the elements to the colors you are actually going to use, this will help Design Space know how many colors of vinyl you are going to use.
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 left hand side of the screen. Make sure you hit the mirror image button for EACH of the mats you have in this project. To do this, you just click the mat to select it and then hit mirror. Start with the 1st color, place the iron-on shiny side down onto your Cricut mat and then load your mat into your machine.
Hit continue and then select your material in the drop down on the screen. In this case, we are using regular iron-on. Lay your first piece of heat transfer shiny side down on the mat. Slide it under the feet of your machine and hit the flashing go button. After it is done cutting, pull the mat out of the machine and repeat with all of the colors.
Peel the heat transfer off of your mat and then weed (peel apart) the heat transfer until just your design remains on the sticky backing. This is where you use the Cricut BrightPad to help you see any cut lines and weed the project properly. Cut apart any of the designs that have multiple pieces in one sheet, so you can place them on the shirt separately.
Add the first layer of iron-on face down on your shirt. You will be able to see through the plastic backing so you can put your project together just the way you want it. Just make sure that none of the letters or images are touching the plastic backing of another element or it will fuse to that instead of the shirt. Heat your iron up to the hottest setting or you EasyPress to 305 degrees. 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. Your shirt is ready to wear!
We Elves Try To Stick to The Four Main Food Groups Shirt
For this project, you will follow the same steps listed above with just a few modifications. For an even easier project, find my design files here.
For this project you will need:
- a blank white shirt
- red holographic viny
- black heat transfer
- green holographic vinyl
- a Cricut
- Cricut EasyPress
- Cricut Brightpad
Type your text into two text boxes in Design Space. You want the Candy, Candy Canes, Candy Corns and Syrup to be in a separate text box from the beginning. Resize the files to fit your shirt, for my shirt which was a child’s 10/12, my words are about 8 inches wide.
Next, do an image search for candy, find all different types of candy and then change the colors in the color palette to let Design Space know you are cutting them all from red and green.
Cut and weed all of the words and candy. Make sure that you mirror all of your images before cutting them.
Cut apart the candy images and place them around the shirt until you like the way the shirt looks. Iron down the first layer of heat transfer which is your words, the candy canes and the bases of all of the candy. Any swirls or other candy decoration will go one with the second layer.
Peel the plastic off of all of the elements on the shirt and add the candy stripes and swirls to the top of the pieces of candy. Cover the entire project with the iron on protector sheet and iron the entire design again. Peel of the plastic and your shirt is ready to wear!
What is your favorite Christmas Movie?
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.
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