As Christmas day is fast approaching, you can use this exercise as a fun Cricut project and make your gifts look more attractive.
Materials needed:
- Cricut machine.
- Grip mat, I used the Standard Grip mat.
- Cardstock in Navy (from the Cape Code Blues set) and White.
- Glitter cardstock in Silver.
Steps
1. You’ll need 2 images: a gift tag image and a snowflake image. I found both images in Cricut’s library of images that are free to use.
2. I aligned the snowflake to where I want it to be on the gift tag.
3. I selected the snowflake image and create an offset of 0.1 inch with curved lines.
Tip: You can choose the thickness of the offset to however thick or thin you like, but I don’t recommend to go lower than 0.05 inches, especially for intricate snowflakes. It’s too thin that it would easily rip while being cut or peeled off from the grip mat.
4. Once the offset is created, the tag will have 3 layers: the gift tag, snowflake and offset of the snowflake. If you notice, the offset image has little holes in between the lines of the snowflakes. To remove the holes, I used the Contour button on the Actions tab.
5. Select the offset layer, if not selected already, then clicking on the Contour button will bring up a subscreen with all the lines that will be cut.
6. So I clicked on each triangle hole to deselect; that way they wouldn’t be cut later. Then just click anywhere on the Design Space screen to get out of the subscreen.
7. The offset is now completely filled with no holes in it.
8. While the offset layer is still selected, I clicked on the Duplicate button to create a copy of it for use later. So now there are 4 layers: tag image, snowflake image and 2 snowflake offsets.
9. I selected the tag and original offset to combine the 2 images together by using the Combine button.
10. Clicking the Combine button brings up the Combine subscreen with different options. I chose the Unite option because I want the images to merge together.
11. Once they are merged, I have a new tag image that is at the top layer, covering my snowflake image. So I arranged the new tag to Send to Back so we can see the snowflake image.
12. I aligned the snowflake image on the new tag. Then I selected both snowflake and tag images to slice.
13. Using the Slice button, the snowflake image was sliced through the tag, creating another snowflake image that was cut from the tag. Since I don’t need the snowflake image anymore, I deleted both snowflake images.
14. To add more depth and border, I created an offset of the tag with 0.1 inch distance and curved lines.
15. But the new offset layer has a few things I need to fix. First, I need to add a string hole at the top of the offset layer to match the hole on the tag. Then the next fix is optional, but you can remove the hole inside the snowflake using the Contour button.
16. To add a string hole on the offset layer, I duplicate the tag layer.
Also, I changed the tag color to white and the new offset to navy to match the cardstock I’ll be using to have a better picture of what the tag will look like.
17. Then I aligned the duplicated tag layer exactly with the tag, so it’s right on top of each other and it looks like there’s only 1 layer when there are actually 2.
18. While the duplicated tag is selected, I clicked on the Contour button to deselect all of the cut lines except the string hole at the top. This string hole will be used to sliced through the navy offset to create a string hole there.
19. I selected both offset layer and string hole from the duplicated tag layer, then click Slice.
20. I deleted the 2 string holes created from the slice. You can tell the hole is cut through the offset layer, because now we can see the grid in the background through the hole.
Now I’m back to only having 3 layers: white tag layer (hidden underneath), navy offset layer, and the dark gray snowflake offset layer.
21. To bring the tag back up, I arranged the layers to bring the white tag layer forward.
I’m almost done! I changed the color of the snowflake offset that’s been off to the side, to a lighter gray.
22. Lastly, I arranged the layers so that the gray snowflake offset is between the white tag and navy offset layers.
23. Finally, done! The tag is complete and will ideally look like this after being cut and assembled.
The cut pieces after going through Cricut.
And assembled.
Final Results!
