Year after year I’ve seen these Christmas plates sold both at Christmas fayres, markets and online and been fascinated in making a personalised one for our nieces and nephews.
Sadly, most of them I’ve seen have been hand-painted, something I’m not even going to attempt. However, as we’ve purchased a Cricut Air Machine this year, creating a Christmas Eve Plate has been easily achievable.
What You Need
- Cricut (Maker or Air doesn’t matter as they both cut vinyl)
- Cricut Mat
- Cricut Weeding tools
- Vinyl (in a colour of your choice for the plate details – To make this easy, and affordable I’ve stuck to one colour, but I know plenty of people who layer the vinyl and use multiple colours to do so)
- A blank plate
- Transfer tape
- Scissors
- Paper
- Pen
How To Make Christmas Eve Plates With Cricut
Start by wiping down your plate, and ensuring it’s free from any residue that will cause problems when applying the vinyl further on in the project.
Next, use some paper, a pen and the lines on your Cricut mat to map the size of each individual piece you’d like to create in the Cricut design space.
While this planning stage isn’t essential it should help you to ensure things are equally proportioned and that everything is going to fit on the plate comfortably.
Hopefully saving you from wasting any vinyl or any time having to re-size and re-cut further on in the Christmas plate creation process.
Next, you’ll want to design the plate on the Cricut Design Space. To make this process as easy as possible.
I’ve included my design here which you can access and customise to meet your requirements.
Pro Tip: Don’t forget to change the name to personalise it to the child you’re creating the plate for and check the dimensions are fixed to the size you outlined above.
Next, you’re going to want to measure, cut and apply the vinyl to your Cricut mat. In this case, to cut everything with the measurements I wanted I required a vinyl sheet that measured 12 inches wide and 4 inches tall.
Pro Tip: Remember you can move each of the individual pieces around at this stage to make the cut fit the size of the vinyl you have – in case you’re planning to use an offcut for example.
Then you’ll want to go ahead and use your Cricut machine to cut out the vinyl.
To make the weeding and plotting process easier I cut each of the individual pieces out using some scissors.
I then began weeding each individual piece.
This process was the slowest and most frustrating of the entire project, especially due to the small font size used for certain words.
Then I plotted the vinyl against the design I did on paper earlier in the process.
From there you’ll want to apply transfer tape to each individual piece and apply it to the place.
You don’t need an individual piece of transfer tape per vinyl, instead, you can re-use the same sheet just to ensure it’s big enough for the largest piece of vinyl.