Snowflake Mobile or Backdrop with Cricut

 

 

Whether you live in a place that never snows, or you just want a winter wonderland inside your house, this Snowflake Mobile brings the magic of snow inside. Hang it from a window to had some snowflakes to your view, or use it as a backdrop for magical holiday pictures.  Whatever way you use it, this mobile is incredibly easy to make with the new Cricut Maker and the perfect way to celebrate winter or lack there of.

Snowflake Mobile or Backdrop

You will need:

• Cricut Maker
• Cricut Bright Pad
• White Cardstock 
• Felt Carousel Sampler
• Corrugated Cardboard Basics Sampler
• Kraft Board in white
• Fishing Line
• a large branch

 

When you open the new Cricut Design Space, it looks like this. 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 This Snowflake Mobile and a Christmas Countdown  Below your projects will be Ready to Make projects , a fun variety of designed 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. To make things even simpler, you can find my cut files on Design Space here. 

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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 snowflake images, which will make this project really fast and easy.

 

Select the image button on the left hand menu bar. It will look like the screen 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 project, I searched for all different kinds of snowflakes.

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 sized all of my snowflakes to be about 5 and a half inches. This sizing will let us get four to a sheet and save the most material.

Make your snowflakes all the same color by clicking on the color dots on the right hand side, this will let your machine know you want to cut them all out of the same material. Hit Make it in the top right corner and then select the kind of material you are cutting on the next screen.

I haven’t had a lot of chances to check out all of the different materials that the Cricut Maker can cut so I knew that I wanted to make this project mixed media, so I could test lots of different materials. For this project I cut sheets out of cardstock, kraftboard, corrugated cardboard and felt.

I picked snowflakes with little tiny intricate details so I could see how well it would cut each thing. Each material has its own challenges. I was worried about the card stock, not because it is a thick material but because it can be so easily ripped and the Maker cut the card stock like a dream. Even in the little tiny details.

I wasn’t sure the cuts were going to go all the way through the kraft board because it was thicker than I expected and the maker did a great job!

The corrugated cardboard was another incredibly successful cut. I was surprised that there were no extra fibers left around the edges. I can’t lie, my absolute favorite material to watch the Maker cut is felt. I have made so much with felt over the years and it is always a painful process of cutting out teeny tiny pieces that look exactly the way you want them too. The Cricut Maker makes this SO easy. I have made Jungle Finger Puppets and a Felt Tea Set all with out any problem.

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Once all of your snowflakes are cut, cut a length of fishing line about four feet long. Thread the fishing line through the first snowflake and then simply knot around the edge of the snowflake to keep it in place. Further down the line, add another snowflake and then knot that one as well. Keep going  until there are 3-4 snowflakes on your line.

After your line is full, tie it to the branch. Repeat until you have between 20-24 snowflakes hanging from your branch.

Tie a long piece of twine or fishing line to either end of the branch so you can hang your mobile.

Hang the mobile in a window or simply in front of a wall as a back drop for holiday photos.

This gorgeous mobile is now hanging in my living room window, but I used it for my daughter’s birthday photos the other day and I absolutely loved the wow factor it brought into the photos! I will be using it for photos in the future for sure.

 

Where would you hang this mobile/backdrop?

 

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This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.