Sunday, January 10, 2010

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. 


19 comments:

  1. Maggie you come up with the most awesome ideas!

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  2. Those are amazing. I love it!!

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  3. I love this! This is so great for someone like me because I find a lot of fonts I like and here you could just use all of them!

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  4. WOW!! Great work! I never would have thought! It is so fun and personal!

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  5. I love it, so cute! I have a Cricut too, I really need to use it more.

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  6. This is so cool! I love matchy-matchy stuff. This is right up my alley. Thanks for stopping by my blog!

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  7. I love these! Great job!

    Are you happy with the Sure Cuts A Lot? I've been thinking about getting it.

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  8. Thanks Dawn!

    Am I happy with Sure Cuts A Lot: yes, and no. I don't like trying to do anything layout wise with it but I think that is because I am so used to traditional design programs like Illustrator. What it takes me 3 minutes to do in Illustrator takes me forever in SCAL.

    BUT - SCAL accepts SVG files from other applications. So I just do all my design in Illustrator, export it as an SVG and open it in SCAL to cut.

    Being able to cut anything I design, was totally worth the price of SCAL. I wouldn't have bought a Cricut if I couldn't cut my own designs.

    I've watched a lot of SCAL tutorials online and am very impressed with what many people are able to do with it, I'm just too attached to Illustrator to learn anything else.

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  9. Wow, what a great idea! I Love the way they look.

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  10. these plates are so fun! love the personalized new look for your dining room!

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  11. I tried to comment but I don't think it went through. So I will try again. I LOVE your plates. So nice with the different fonts on each one. You are very creative. I want to make me some monogram plates! Great job. Very classy design. Hope you don't get duplicate message.

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  12. What a great idea! I love them!

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  13. These look great. I have no clue how you did this you must be a geneus! Good job. Those letters would make great pillows too. Thanks for sharing.

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  14. This is so fun! Thanks for sharing!

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  15. I think they look perfect, and soooo unique! I think you could sell them for sure :)

    Thanks for linking up to Mi4M!

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  16. I just LOVE anything that has a monogram...awesome job you did on these plates! I'm loving what I see here...soooo...you have a new follower:)

    Hope you have a great Tuesday!
    Blessings,
    Linda

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  17. stretched the kerning individually, made all letters join together, created a new Cap 'M', and then saved all as an EPS file for the signwriter to cut from directly. vinyl cut lettering online

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