This post is NOT sponsored in any way by Cricut. I am using affiliate links to the products we used but these methods would also work well with other cutting machines and methods, too. I’m totally new to Cricut and making things this way so please ask any questions if you are unclear and I’ll do my best to answer!
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Have you been seeing the mass influx of ridiculously cute graphic T companies flooding social media these days? I’m pretty much in love with every single design I see from my favorite small shops on instagram. When it’s a special occasion, I pick up a few here and there, but I just cannot justify spending lots of money on alltheshirts. Plus I have my own cute ideas all the time for fun kid-shirts and just haven’t figured out how to make them myself for my girls.
Until now!
My sister in law, Haley, brought over her Cricut and we started making the cutest little shirts ever! They’re fast, so easy, and can be literally anything you want!
Materials:
1. Cricut Explore cutting machine and accessories
4. Any JPEG design
5. T-shirt
6. Iron
Here’s my method.
1. Draw your design. Use regular ol’ pen and paper. These are my favorite calligraphy pens but really anything will work.
2. THE GAME CHANGER: download Adobe Capture CC on your smartphone. I use an iPhone 6+ but I’m sure it works the same across the board. This program turns any design into a SMOOTH vector graphic- which basically means it makes your hand drawn doodle look clean and professional! This app is pretty self explanatory but you basically just take a picture of your design in the program, delete any unnecessary parts, and let it draw the smooth curves for you. Done!
3. Save your designs and email them to yourself so you can open them on your computer.
4. Upload the designs into your Cricut as a cut shape. Delete the white areas and save.
5. Make SURE you invert the design for iron on transfer, then follow the machine instructions to cut our your iron on transfer vinyl.
In the image above we FORGOT to invert the design. If we had flipped this over to iron it would have ended up backwards. Womp Womp! Don’t forget this step!!!
That’s it! So, so easy. Just peal off the background of your transfer and apply to your shirt with a regular iron.
My two methods for sourcing cheap but nice solid color shirts are these: Old Navy clearance. Their kids T’s are super soft, and so cheap! All the girls shirts in this post (so… six shirts!) cost me a total of JUST LESS than $14. That’s a steal! The second would be to check the consignment shops for plain T’s. I can almost always find a ton of plain solid color shirts that would work so well for this and are definitely a good price.
I’m going to attach all of my thanksgiving designs for you to download yourself and make your own cute shirts! You should be able to right click and save these images right from this post… I haven’t tried inserting JPEGS like this before so bear with me- if this works YAY! If it doesn’t, I’ll link them some other way.
Happy crafting!
xo
-J
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