CRYCUT

Well, not actually. There was no crying but I definitely felt the pressure to get it right on the first cut on my MAIDEN CRICUT VOYAGE!

For Christmas I got a Cricut (CryCut, lol) Maker 3 and was super excited about it. I had been eyeing them for a few months thinking I could use it to make fun stickers and such. And I knew that it would come in handy for making things for my best friend’s East Nashville bachelorette party.

Did I know what I was doing? No. Did I watch YouTube videos about it? Yes. Am I pro now? Hell no. Did I have fun and did it come out well? Yes and YES!

I went with a Pyrex-inspired design on a flat, black, metal bottle opener. I figured that kind of surface would be easiest to engrave on and have the best color contrast without having to do much work. It was really fun coming up with the design in Illustrator. I wasn’t familiar yet with designing in Cricut Design Space. It transferred pretty easily over to the Cricut software once I figured out how to group/align everything. That was probably the hardest part. But now I know!

I only screwed up one of them because I didn’t press the bottle opener hard enough down on the sticky mat. I had taped it down with painters tape but I guess the engraving had enough pressure to lift and move it around just enough to make it a total mess without completely coming off the pad. So fun. Lesson learned. Press down on the pad before you begin even if it’s taped down!

And I guess the alignment was a little tricky, too. They weren’t as centered as I would have liked but they weren’t terrible. In the end, I think they came out really well and the girls all seemed to be happy with them. I think if I had to do this a lot, I’d probably want to get one of those laser engravers. That way I could have filled in the words instead of just going with outlines. But since I don’t really plan on doing a ton of engraving in the future, I think the Cricut 3 will do just fine.

Oh, and “Hood Rat Shit”? My best friend’s new last name will be Hood and, well, IYKYK!