Using My Cricut to Create Custom Die-cut Sentiments for My Shaker Card

Card making is an expensive hobby! I love the look of the large sentiment dies people are using to create their beautiful cards. The cost associated with those big beautiful dies can be expensive. I don't personally own very many sentiments dies, so I decided to create my own sentiment using my Cricut.

In theory, this should be easy. Type your sentiment in Cricut Design Studio, then cut it out on card stock, and voila - beautiful card! If only it were that easy!

Getting a clean cut from my Cricut was hard. I used 90lb Neenah White Card Stock for my card top. I set my Cricut to cut 110lb card stock with "more pressure" and... my Cricut was unable to cut through the card stock completely. It was a newer blade, so I didn't think changing that would help much.

I then decided to duplicate the sentiment two more times, and I aligned each sentiment (three total) on top of one another in Design Space and Attached each sentiment. This would tell my Cricut to cut the sentiment out 3x. Surely this would cut through the card stock.

The good news, it cut out the words in the sentiment beautifully. The bad news was the small bits of the letters were mangled and unusable - the negative bits I would need to make the letters look like letters I couldn't use.

In general, I loved the outline of the words, I just needed the clean bits to the letters. With that in mind, I decided to cut the sentiment out on text-weight paper. I believe I used book/text-weight paper, essentially printer paper. This time, I reduced the number of cuts to 2x and I set my Cricut to cut Washi Tape. I figured a light setting would do less damage to the thinner paper. This worked out beautifully!

Now that I had my card top, I glued this to a piece of acetate. This gave me a good base to glue the negative letter bits. For the background of the shaker card, I created an ombre effect using Tim Holtz Dried Marigold and Spun Sugar. I also darkened the pink side up a bit using My Favorite Things Poppin Pink.

For building a shaker card, I learned how to do this by watching Bethadilly's YouTube Channel. She is incredible at teaching how-to's, including making a shaker card. I highly recommend her channel!

Supplies Used:

90lb Neenah White Card Stock

Tim Holtz Distress Oxide in Dried Marigold and Spun Sugar

Cricut Maker

Sequins