I’m really excited to share this Valentine’s Day project using my Cricut Maker! If you read my previous post (CLICK HERE TO READ), you’ll know that I am practicing hand lettering as one of my 2018 resolutions, and one of my favorite crafting hobbies is making projects with my Cricut Maker (BUY ONE HERE), so I thought I’d combine the two! I decided to make a Valentine’s Day t-shirt for my youngest daughter using one of my hand lettered sketches by turning the sketch into an image that can be imported and cut in Cricut Design Space from Cricut Iron-On Vinyl. And, head to the end of the post to see the rest of the Valentine Cricut Projects from some of my blogger friends!

This post contains affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase through these links, I will receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you. These links help us to keep our blog content free, so thank you!

This is the hand-lettered sketch I started with–just a simple design on a piece of scratch paper using a fine point Sharpie marker:

First, take a picture of your sketch with your phone or camera (I used my iPhone 7) in as good of light as you can. Then, you need to open your photo in whatever photo-editing software you have access to or use regularly. I use Adobe Photoshop, but there are tons of free options. You just want to use something to lighten up your photo and enhance the contrast of the text so it’s easier to load in Cricut Design Space. Here is the brightness setting if you’re using Photoshop.

If you look in the corner of the picture above and then at the picture below, you can see the difference in color/brightness. Crop your image and save it as a jpeg.

Once you have it saved, you need to head over to Cricut Design and start a new project. On the bottom left hand side you are going to click on the “Upload” tab and you’ll get this screen:

Click the “upload image” button and choose the image you saved.

Since the image is just black and white, Cricut considers that a “Simple” design, so choose that option and then continue:

Now you need to take out or “erase” all of the areas that are white/that you don’t want to cut.

Just use your mouse and click on the white areas (don’t forget in the middle of the letters!) so your image looks like this (here’s a close up):

(Here’s the full screen):

Since I’ll be cutting this file out of Iron-On Vinyl, I chose the Right side: “Save as a cut image” then click “Save” to continue:

Click the image you uploaded and insert it onto your canvas:

You’re ready to cut!

Make sure when you cut the file, you turn on the “Mirror” setting:

I used a light pink Cricut Iron-On vinyl (I know it looks white in the pictures) and the Cricut EasyPress (BUY IT HERE) to iron the design onto the shirt:

I love how it turned out! And once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy to make your own sketches into Cricut Design Space files that can be cut. So easy that I’m sure I’ll be using this technique again and again.

If you’d like save some time and make this t-shirt using my handwritten drawing to import into Cricut Design Space, DOWNLOAD IT HERE.

SaveSave

SaveSaveSaveSave

SaveSave