I've had a Cricut for several years now, courtesy of my lovely mother in law's great taste in Christmas presents. I used to make cards on it, but lately it's been hanging around, waiting for me to be friends with it again.
As part of the pantry update, I knew I wanted to make my dream of coordinated and labeled dry storage containers into a reality. I already had the containers, with some half-assed labels I threw on some (not all) of them as part of my nesting phase before I had Abby.
I saw a tutorial on using the Cricut to cut out vinyl letters, and then adhering them to the containers. It looked simple enough, but I hadn't ever used the Cricut to cut vinyl and the thought of figuring out what sizes to use for each different shaped container with a different number of letters on each one put me into the overwhelmed mode where I chose to not do anything.
Two weeks go by, and I'm tired of looking at poor Mr. Cricut waiting on the dining room table for me to take action, and a wild hair struck, so I went for it. I started practicing on a blank piece of paper and taking notes as I went along.
I quickly found a good size for the parenthesis (3" with the Real Size ON), and got lucky with my second try on some lettering. The 1' size worked perfectly for most of my labels (Real Size OFF). Pure trial and error gave me a final list of what words to cut, and what size to use, when cutting all of the labels out. I tried to stay organized, and I used the longest word for each size container as my starting place.
My main concern was having the parenthesis look uniform and the lettering be proportional to the size of the container, but as you can see, the container sizes vary greatly!
See how the spaghetti container is tall and skinny, while the quinoa and panko containers are short and fat? Luckily, I made small tweaks to the size of the lettering and parenthesis and I think it all worked out. That's what made me paralyzed before I started: not having the patience or energy or confidence that I could make it look as good as I wanted it to. But jumping in and going for it really worked out!
I tweaked as I went along, and stayed flexible when cutting out the lettering and parenthesis to fit as many on each page as I could. The smaller containers were really difficult because the letters were extremely small! I loved using up an entire page of vinyl and fitting most of my lettering on just that one.
The process was simple:
1. Cut out lettering. The Cricut makes it easy because I could type an entire word out and it would cut it exactly as it needed to look on the finished container.
2. Peel back the excess vinyl, leaving the letters on the sticky mat.
3. Use a spare piece of contact paper, to pick up the lettering. Just stick it down on top of the letters you want to transfer, and rub with a flat tool. When you pick it up, the sticky mat will hold onto the backing of the vinyl, so the letters will have their sticky back exposed.
Sometimes when you peel it back, it picks up small pieces- like the inside of the 'a'. Just pick it out with a small tool or your fingers.
I would set it on the table like this and pick out all unnecessary pieces.
5. Peel back the contact paper.
Sometimes the pieces would stick to the contact paper. Have a small tool handy and you can make it come loose and stick to the container.
6. Repeat until you have finished all containers.
7. Soothe your whining kid when she asks to use all of your sharp tools, but still tell her no.
This set of tools made by Cricut is amazing for jobs like this with tiny cuts. I added my own exacto knife and the big flat tool is sold separately.
8. Pat yourself on the back and admire your hard work. It's not hard but I definitely have to be in the right mood to work on it, and it's so worth it in the end!
Here's the finished product!
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