For years my kids have used a color-changing acrylic night light. They have gone through a few different designs over the last year but the love the color-changing aspect of the night light. When Cricut released the new engraving tool, I knew that our own custom lights would be my first project with it! It was even easier than I imagined it being and I have a feeling we may end up with a whole stack of sheets they can switch out in our light base!
The amazing thing about the Cricut Maker, is that it was created with the Adaptive Tool System, so all of the following tools can be purchased to use with your Current Maker machine. For those of you not familiar with the new Cricut tools here is a quick overview:
New Cricut Tools
Basic Perforation Blade – Create your own precision perforation for any items that need to tear quickly. This is great for coupon books or journals.
Wavy Blade – A beautiful decorative edge that gives a wave cut. This is great for vinyl, iron-on, and cardstock to give a fun edge to your projects.
Fine Debossing Tip – Add a 3D aspect to your paper projects with this amazing debossing tool
Engraving Tip – Create stylish designs in thick materials with beautiful grooves
Harry Potter Acrylic Night Light with Cricut
You will need:
- A Cricut Maker
- The New Engraving Blade
- Acrylic Sheets cut down to about 4×6
- TrueControl Knife
- LED Light Base
To start either upload your images or search for the ones you want from the Cricut Library. All of the elements for both of these designs can be found in the Cricut Library of images. To make things really easy, you can find my cut files here: Always Light and Harry Potter Light. If you would like to learn how to create this project yourself, follow the instructions.
For the Always light search for “Doe” you will find the following image. Insert it into your canvas.
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Click the eyes on the far right of the canvas for all of the elements but the basic doe. This turns of that aspect of the image. Add a text box and type the word Always in it. I used the font WildFlower for my doe. Drag your word over top of the doe and center it where you want. Select both the doe and the word and hit attach. This will make sure the words are etched on top of the doe instead of just next to it.
Font
Change the fonts of each line by clicking on the line and then selecting a font from the drop-down menu in the top left corner.
For the Harry Potter light, search for glasses and lighting bolts and insert one of each into your canvas. I used Round Glasses(#M33964) and Lightning Bolt(#MBC05F). For the lightning bolt, I turned off all of the aspects but the basic bolt.
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Resize and move your glasses and lighting bolt to where you want them. 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. When you have both the way you want them, select them both and hit attach in the bottom right corner.
After your shapes are attached, they are considered one image by Design Space. Click on your image and you will see a dropdown menu in the top left corner. It will say linetype over it and will probably say Cut in the box. Click the drop-down and change the linetype to Engrave. This will let you use the Engrave tool.
Hit make it in the top right corner and prepare your Maker to engrave! Add the engrave tool to your machine.
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Since you selected Engrave on your linetype, your machine knows that is the tool you are planning on using. It will edit your materials all on its own to only show you compatible materials. You will want to select thick acrylic for this project.
Place your acrylic on your mat.
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I always tape my thick materials to the mat to ensure they don’t move.
After your Maker is finished engraving, peel the acrylic off of the mat and brush it off.
Place your acrylic piece on top of your lightbox, so you can see how far in it needs to be trimmed. Mark this with a marker. Use your TrueControl knife to cut the rectangle of plastic out of the acrylic.
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Place your acrylic in your light box and turn it on!
That’s it! These lights are so easy and so cool! I think I am going to have a lot of fun making these.
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.
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