Living In Upstate: Cricut

This summer my family and I had a reunion camping at Niagara Falls. My sister wanted custom shirts and we told her I could make them with the Cricut. I had a made a few custom shirts before. What was really important to me is they had a cute design and were comfortable to wear. She sent me the template that she liked and we came up with a design on Cricut Design Space.

Cricut Design Space really likes to get more money and has a subscription service. I already pay for the Adobe Suite and do not want to pay more money for fonts and simple designs. I found a picture of Niagara I liked and thickened the lines in photoshop. Then we found some fonts I had on my computer on designed the shirt. I tried using Adobe fonts, but they would not appear in Cricut Design Space. I could have designed the shirts in photoshop and saved it and brought it over, but we were short on time and I did not want to fuss with it.

After I got the design ready we found some vinyl, Target is a really good place to get vinyl. It is so much cheaper than Michael's. We did black for the light shirts and white for the darker shirts.

One of the most important things for us was that shirts were not all white and had some personality. Michaels and Joann Fabric have solid color shirts, but they are super scratchy. We decided to go to Target because I knew they had solid color shirts that are comfortable and cute fitting. My family were expecting bright color shirts. But the color scheme at Target was fall colors and I loved them so much more than the bright color shirts they were expecting. Here are all the light colored shirts with all the black vinyl. I did not have time to get all the dark shirts because we were making to the wire because we did not get the white vinyl until a few days later. There were no colors in toddlers that went with the color scheme. We found the toddler shirts at Old Navy.

I also wanted to incorporate the outdoors with the shirts and made sure to prominently feature the falls.

Here is my sister weeding the white vinyl. I really like the smart vinyl because I do not have to do any extra peeling. We ironed them on. For some reason they did not iron on as well this time maybe it's because we were making so many and just trying to get them done fast. I have to reiron mine and my daughters.

Here is my mom and dad wearing their shirts. We had such a fun time. I do not put pictures of kids on my website, but the family picture turned out so cute!

We have been renovating our house like CRAZY. I am excited to finally start putting things on our walls. I thought a "Our Family Story" would be a great addition to our wall. It has the day we met, our anniversary, and birthdays of all the kiddos. It can be made to accomodate any size frame. For this project I used an 8x10.

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Click here to get the Cricut.

1. The first step is to select some paper.

white cardstock
black cardstock

2. The second step is to put in the correct dates and number of kids. To put in the dates change the text box. To add kids or change gender copy and paste the kids in front of each date. Here is the file. After the dates are changed weld the text together otherwise it will come out in separate circles.

3. Cut this file with the black cardstock.

4. The cutouts can be removed two ways, with this Cricut tool flat, or bending the board and gently separating the cardstock from the board. This helps prevent the paper from bending.

5. The first time I did this I did not cut deep enough and the letters were stuck in the circle. Instead of using the scissors, I opted to cut again deeper and save myself a headache.