Unpacking my Cricut and Beginner Wine Glass Project

What can you do with a Cricut? You can cut paper, vinyl and other materials to create all kinds of personalized home decor and gifts. Check out my Pinterest Cricut Project Board for inspiration and read below to see how I unpacked my Cricut Explore Air 2 and got started on my first project.

Why did I want a Cricut?

My obsession with the Cricut began by watching YouTube DIYers create home decor using vinyl decals or creating stencils. Noticing objects in local shops that I loved, I thought I would be able to create similar, custom items if I just had a Cricut. I tried to create some of these items using contact paper, an X-acto knife, a printer and paint. My Valentine Conversation Heart plate project was complicated and didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. I finally caved in and treated myself to a Cricut.

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What did I order?

I ordered the Cricut Explore Air 2 + Everything Bundle from the Cricut website. The Blue machine was my first choice, but it was on backorder and I was ready to craft. In the end, I love the Mint green color.

Once I unpacked the vinyl, I realized most was heat transfer vinyl and not necessarily the colors I wanted to work with. Therefore, I ordered additional vinyl. I had so much heat transfer vinyl and ordered napkins to customize and use for practice projects.

Unpacking my Cricut and downloading Design Space

I began by carefully removing the machine, cords and instructions from the box. I then removed all of the protective materials.

After unpacking everything I downloaded the Design Space app. It was pretty straightforward. Although, it did take a few tries to figure out exactly where it wanted me to drag the Cricut logo on my desktop. Success!!!

When you load the app and set-up an account, it walks you step-by-step through a practice project and even includes the paper required. I eagerly plowed through the set up and pressed the button to cut. No cuts in the paper! Turns out the blade was raised and the paper wasn’t cut. Make sure you check this before getting started.

Starting my first project

Cricut Design Space has a limited number of free images and I couldn’t find anything I liked for this project. Therefore, I chose a text project. Black vinyl wasn’t included in my starter bundle, so I picked a pretty green color and got to work setting up the text, adjusting the size to fit my wine glasses and selecting fonts. I also unpacked my basic tool set, which was included in the starter bundle.

Quotes I chose included ‘Carpe Diem’ (seize the day) and ‘In Vino Veritas’ (in wine there is truth). Design space has a nice selection of fonts. I used Black Jack for Carpe Diem and Herculanum for In Vino Veritas.

To get started with the cutting step, I cut a small piece of vinyl from the roll and stuck this to the Cricut cutting mat making sure it was in the cutting region. The scraper made it easy to push out any air bubbles trapped under the vinyl.

The next step was to load the mat into the machine and then press the Cricut logo to start the cutting process. Super easy to just follow the flashing lights on the machine buttons.

Removing the cut vinyl from the mat was straight forward and I didn’t have any problems.

I used the weeding tool to remove all of the vinyl I didn’t want transferred to my wine glasses. Make sure you get the pieces out from the letters.

Using the scraper, I attached a small piece of transfer vinyl to my design and cut the quotes apart to make application easier.

Applying vinyl quotes to wine glasses

The first step in the application process was to clean the surface of the glasses with alcohol to ensure good adhesion of the vinyl.

cleaning wine glass surface with alcohol

Filling the glass with water helped ensure that I was able to apply the vinyl straight and keep the designs at similar locations or heights on both glasses.

I used the scraper to ensure complete adhesion of the vinyl to the surface of the glass and push out any air bubbles. Ziggy was very curious 🥰.

What do you think about my first Cricut project? I love the wine glasses and can’t wait to get started on my next project. I will explore tips and tricks to create designs in Canva, so be sure to check back for more Cricut project inspiration. Do you have tips or advice you can share for creating custom designs?