Grumpy?

Hello there

I certainly was grumpy at 4.15 this morning when Chris's phone made a noise which woke me up! Why was his phone in the bedroom and why was it on? No reason whatsoever!! Which didn't make the situation any less irritating!

It's 20.21 on me typing this and I'm rather tired as I couldn't sleep after that and decided to get up at 4.30 and get ready for work, as I have to get up at 5 on Mondays and Tuesdays anyway for work. I was at work by 5.30 and did a very busy eight hours.

Despite this story of woe of mine, I'm now rather happy. One of the very first UK Cricut Iron-on purchases was made by me on 19th July from cuttingedgecrafts (free postage on all orders!) and it arrived today! The Americans have had it since April but it was only available in this country from last week.

In a nutshell it's vinyl which is usable on fabric - visit their site if you want more info than that, as I'm too tired for indepth details and they can do it so much better than I.

Imagine the possibilities to personalise all fabric projects! I foresee me using this to sell items. Which items and for how much and how I'll market them etc etc are questions for another day. 

Progress not perfection.

This is how the image started off on Cricut Craft Room.
Since the vinyl sits on a clear transfer layer, you
need to flip words, so that they appear the
correct way round after being transferred to your fabric

This is a real close up of the finished practice piece.
As you can see my iron was rather too hot.
On my next practice piece I will start the iron
alot cooler and then get it hotter if required.

There are full instructions in the packaging and there are videos and tutorials available, which makes it a good thing to have not had the product until after America; as now we have all the resources to help us out :-)

The settings for each Cricut machine are clearly shown in a chart on the packaging but I had to use blade depth 3, pressure 3 and speed 2 to get my Expression machine to kiss-cut as required (you don't want the clear carrier layer to be cut as well as the vinyl). The suggested settings said blade depth 2.


The instructions state to use the highest heat on your iron but like I have said, I definitely recommend that you use just a small practice piece of the vinyl first and also use a lower temperature setting on your iron, so that the vinyl doesn't shrivel up on impact like mine did :-) Also use a scrap piece of fabric, so that you're not worried about that either.

My transfer might not be perfect but it is definitely secure to the fabric and has helped me to see how easy it was to peel the vinyl off the carrier layer, with a bit of 'weeding'. It's also opened up yet another world of possibilities for creating projects to sell or just for me!

I'm off to bed at 20.48 as I'm well and truly finished for today but I'll go to sleep alot happier than I woke up :-)

Take care out there