How to Make Wood Slice Ornaments

Welcome to day two of our Craft Along Countdown to Christmas. Today we're going to be making these really pretty wood slice ornaments or you can also use them for coasters in your home at Christmas. Start by taking a dried out branch and mine was in our garage for about a year and cut them into quarter inch slices. Then you're going to take chalkboard paint or regular chalk paints. You can use acrylic paint as well and you're just going to paint the face of your wood slices and you can do both the top and the bottom or just the top depending how you're going to use these. And I just used a brush and free-handed it. You could use taped around the circle if you felt that was necessary. I think it's pretty simple and I did several coats on each of these and now they're ready to decorate. So we're going to start by opening Cricut Design Space on our computer and we're going to open up a new project. So it's taking a minute to load here. Just go up to the top right corner click on new project and you'll see your canvas show up here. So we're going to look for those files that we downloaded and we're going to click on the upload button on the right hand side. You can see I already have mine uploaded but I'm going to do it with you as well. So we're going to click on upload image and then we're going to browse our computer and we're going to find where we downloaded them. So most likely in the downloads folder you're going to find your Joy to the World SVGs and you can select whichever one you're wanting to use. I'm going to use the Joy to the World one first. So make sure that's selected with the green box around it and then just click on the open button and then we're going to select it on the recently uploaded files. And some of our words moved around a little bit here so we're going to just rearrange those in a little bit better arrangement. The ORLD we're going to move up slightly and then the W we're going to move down a little bit. So now we're going to select the entire Joy to the World and we're just going to click on attach and that will just make it so when we cut it it won't move the Joy to the World around it'll all be in the same spot. So I'm going to resize this. My wood slices are about three and a half inches so I'm going to do my Joy to the World about three inches. You can adjust that according to the size of your own wood slices and then if you're making multiple ornaments with this same Joy to the World you can just select it all and then in edit you can copy it and then paste it onto the canvas so then you have another Joy to the World so it'll cut multiple ones with the one piece of vinyl. And I'm going to make several of these so I'll make a couple more copies here just cut copy and paste them and then just resize them again to whatever size you're cutting for your wood slice mine again is around three inches. If you're wanting to cut the globe or the other words then you can just go ahead and upload those in the same way that we did with the last image and just go ahead and add it to your canvas as well and then select it and add to canvas and then resize it and I guess arrange it however you're wanting to cut that onto your canvas. So I'll just do a couple globes here and these are nice you can actually do cut them separately and then I'm going to use a couple ornaments where I put the globe image on first the vinyl and then I'll put the Joy to the World just on top of it so we're going to resize these globes to about three inches as well and then I think we're ready to cut so go up to the make it and then I'm going to do it on the mat and just click on confirm. I have a 12 by 12 I'm using today you can also use a 12 by 24 but once you have the right size selected then just go ahead and click on confirm and then you can see how it lines it up on your mat you can see the Joy to the World is all together and it has the globes on the second page so that looks good to me because I'm going to do the globes in a slightly different color than the Joy to World. So once it looks good then we're going to go ahead and we're going to continue. For these ornaments we're just going to use regular vinyl so my maker is showing up here looks good it's connected I'm going to click on the vinyl and then I sometimes will select the more pressure but the default should be fine too and once all this looks good then we're ready to cut. So we're going to load our vinyl and once we have our vinyl on our mat we're going to just load it into our machine then you'll see the Cricut button blinking and we're going to go ahead and press that and then we'll let the machine do its magic. You can see I have a kind of a scrap piece of vinyl on here I like to use up as much of the vinyl as I can without wasting it so I think since these Joy to the Worlds are just taking up six inches of the top of the mat it should be just fine so I'm going to let the machine do its cutting and then we're going to add the images onto our ornaments. So now I'm going to take my weeder I cut around the Joy to the World I'm just going to weed the smallest areas in between the E's and the O's and the other letters first and then I'm going to just gently remove the area around the Joy to the World. The weeder works great for this if you don't have one I'll link below to the different supplies I'm using today but just go ahead and weed out your design and now you can see it the Joy to the World's there so we're going to start with taking some transfer tape and I'm going to use my scraper and I'm just going to rub that image onto the transfer tape. Now if you haven't used transfer tape it's a super easy way to keep the design all in place and to transfer it onto your work surface or whatever you're putting the image on so just scrape it nice and hard and then you'll see it comes off on the transfer tape and then we're just going to take our wood slice center our Joy to the World in the middle of it and then we're going to take the scraper again and we're going to rub rub rub that onto the wood slice. Now if your transfer tape is really fresh sometimes the vinyl likes to stick a little bit more to the tape than like the wood surface we're using. One way to kind of make a smoother more adhesive surface for the wood slices is to actually use a little Mod Podge or other sealant on top of the paint so that you have a nice smooth surface. The vinyl might come off a little bit easier but as you can see you don't need to do that and I'm actually going to seal the top of the Joy to the World with Mod Podge so I do have this dishwasher safe Mod Podge. You can use any Mod Podge for this and actually if you left the wood slices like this they could serve as a coaster as well so you could use these as coasters or ornaments. I'm going to turn them into ornaments by adding a little hole at the top of the wood slice with the drill so I just took a small drill bit and then just drilled holes in the top of my wood slices and then now I'm going to take a piece of twine and just feed that through that hole and you can use twine you can use ribbon or something else to hang it with. I like to add a little bit of extra sometimes to the twine so once the twine is attached to my wood slice then you can add wooden beads you can add a little bit of raffia or other decorative embellishments to these ornaments as well. And here we have our completed ornaments. They're super easy to make a great first project for a Cricut machine. I hope you enjoyed watching. I hope you join us tomorrow for day three of our Craft Along countdown to Christmas. Thanks so much for watching and don't forget to hit the button if you like this video.