Letter Plates

I gave you a sneak peak of these last week...

We've got a plate rack in our dinning room that was a gift from my husband for our first Christmas in this house. Throughout the year I put different plates in it depending on the season, here is what we do at Christmas:

But I don't have any plates that we just generally use that aren't seasonally specific. I decided I wanted to do something with my cricut... I thought I wanted to do each of our monograms, there were room for 4 plates, we have 4 people. Perfect.

Until I started working with the monograms and just didn't like the way they were turning out.

But then I decided to just do our first initials because the monograms had so many common letters but our first names are all different. I created the artwork in illustrator and saved the file as an SVG to open in Sure Cuts A Lot and then cut with black vinyl on the cricut.

Here are the materials I started with:

Pictured are:

• My cricut expression
• Netbook with Sure Cuts A Lot software
• 12"x24" matte for the cricut
• 4 dinner plates
• 12"x24" sheet of black vinyl.
• Contact paper to transfer the vinyl from the backing paper, to the plate
• Cricut tools including a spatula to lift the cut vinyl and a popsicle stick to burnish.

Step 1 was to open the file I created in Illustrator into Sure Cuts A Lot.

 Step 2 - Cut the Vinyl and then remove the portion that you do not want to transfer to the plate.

Step 3 - Cut a piece of contact paper and place on top of the letters and then use the popsicle stick to burnish over the letter to help get them stuck to the contact paper and give up the backing paper.

Step 4 - Gently pull up the contact paper making sure all the vinyl letters come with you. If not, put the contact paper down and burnish again.

Step 5 - Position the contact paper with the cut letters over top of the plate and then burnish over the letters again.

Step 6 - Peel up the contact paper and you've got yourself a decorative* plate!!!

Here is the plate rack with the finished collection of plates:

And close ups of each of our plates:

 

 

 

I'm beyond thrilled with how these have turned out and I really enjoyed the process of making them... I'm toying with the idea of refining my process and selling them. You may notice that I still have a lot to learn. Some of the fonts I picked really didn't work with some of the letters and I had to pull them off... but not one else, well, except you - know that.

*note, these are DECORATIVE plates, they shouldn't be used to eat off of, serve food from, submerged in water or put in the dish washer.