DIY Car Trash Bag Using Your Cricut

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Maker's Gonna Learn YouTube channel. My name's Alisha and today I'm going to be showing you guys a really fun craft. We're going to be sewing and we're going to be cutting fabric with our Cricut. If you're new to the Cricut world, there are a lot of cool different things, different types of blades that you can do with your Cricut machine. Cutting fabric is one of my favorites just because the cuts are so clean and we're using like a you probably use a rotary cutter to actually cut your fabric, but the Cricut's going to do it for us today. So I'm going to go ahead and show you guys everything you need to get started. So to start off, you're obviously going to need some fabrics. Now these are just like cotton fabrics. I got these at Hobby Lobby. You can use what you have on hand or if you're making it for someone, maybe see what kind of colors they would like, but you're going to need like an outer pattern and then an inner lining. These are my colors. They coordinate together. I thought that terrazzo pattern was super cute. I've got these little sewing clips. If you all have been using sewing pins and you've never tried sewing clips, these are a game changer. Y'all need to invest in these. They're so much easier and they come in different sizes so you can clip your fabric together, but I do have some sewing pins here as well and then I've got our rotary blade. So this is similar to like a rotary cutter you would use to cut fabric except it's teeny tiny and we're going to put it inside of our Cricut. I've got a pair of big scissors as well as these tiny scissors for when we actually start sewing. I'm using a brayer. This is for when we apply the fabric to our mat. I've got a spatula, a seam ripper, and then a pencil, and then I've got some of these stick-on squares. These are just velcro squares. You can get the ones where you just cut them. Just something to where we're going to be able to connect our strap across whenever we complete our trash bag. I've got heat and bond as well as vinyl mat fuse. So heat and bond is going to allow us to add some embellishments on the bag. This mat vinyl fuse is in order to make the inner lining of our trash bag waterproof. You're going to need this. Now you could use oil cloth if you wanted to. You could also use like that nylon polyester material that they use like on wind breakers or any type of like waterproof material is going to be nice so that you can wipe it clean, but if you have a specific cotton fabric that you want to use, you can just cover it with this mat vinyl fuse and it makes it virtually waterproof. Really it just makes it a lot easier to clean. And then you're also going to need a mini press or just an iron. I use this mini press for everything. So I'm going to be using that today. You're going to need a 24-inch fabric grip mat for this. Now if you only have a 12-inch mat, you could technically like cut your pieces in half. So I'm going to give you guys the exact measurements you're going to need, but you will have to actually stitch your pieces together. If you're a more experienced sewer, that shouldn't be like too big of a deal, but the 24-inch mat is going to give us more of a seamless look, but you could achieve the same thing with a 12-inch mat if you really wanted to. You are going to need a sewing machine as well as a Cricut, and I'm using the Maker 3 today. Now that we have all of our supplies, let's hop into Design Space and I'm going to show you guys how to lay this out before we actually cut our fabric. Okay, now that we're in Design Space, what we're going to do is start by laying out our biggest pieces of fabric. So we're going to be cutting squares. I'm going to go ahead and pull that shape in and make sure it's unlocked. And up here in our measurements, I'm going to type in 11 by 20.5. So 11 by 20.5, and I'm going to zoom out. So we've got this rectangle shape. We're going to be cutting this three times. So we're going to be cutting the outer fabric with this size, the inner fabric, and we're also going to be cutting the matte vinyl fuse. Now you can adhere the matte vinyl fuse before you cut it. I will actually do that so you guys can see it that way, or you can cut it just alone. And then we are going to need a one piece of a 4 by 14 from our outer fabric. So that terrazzo fabric that I have, I'm going to go ahead and pull in another square. I'm going to unlock it. And this one is going to be four inches wide by 14 tall. Now this seems really thick for a strap, but we're going to be folding it up and pressing it so that it looks like a nice, clean strap. Now that we have our shapes, let's go to make it. We're going to select on matte and it's automatically going to put us at a 12 by 24 inch matte because we made our square so big. And I'm going to go ahead and select continue. We're using the maker three. Then you're going to browse all materials and we are going to type in cotton and you can do it on default pressure. Um, I've cut with the maker on default pressure and it was perfectly fine with the rotary blade. The maker three, I typically have to do more pressure. So I'm going to go ahead and change that and make sure I've got my rotary blade installed. And then we will send it through the Cricut. Okay. So before I put this on the mat, I want to make sure everything is pressed really well. It's been folded up. So I just, I'm going to run this little mini press over where we've got some of our wrinkles and make sure everything is ironed out really nicely. Okay. So I'm just going to lay this on over top of our fabric and I'm going to take the scissors and just kind of loosely cut all the way around. And then I'm going to pull this fabric up here and I'm going to kind of trim it up. That way it doesn't get caught up in the Cricut, but I'm going to align this top edge here and the long edge kind of pull it taut and you can take your brayer here and go over it to make sure it's super smoothed out. If you've never used a fabric grip mat before, um, then you might not know this, but these fabric grip mats are so sticky. I think they're more sticky than like a strong grip mat. They're very, very sticky, especially if they're brand new. So if you get the brayer on here, it's going to stay really well whenever you go to cut it. Just make sure that if there are any wrinkles, you're kind of pulling them out as you go. Okay. And then you can see along this top edge, there's a little bit of extra fabric. I'm just going to go ahead and trim that. And then there's some over here on the bottom. I'm going to trim that up as well. You just want to make sure it's within the guideline parameters on the mat where the numbers are. You want to be inside of that square. And then I'm just going to braid this back down and you guys can see, um, this corner right here, you can kind of see that there's like an area showing. So I'm going to send it through the Cricut up from this top edge. That way, whenever it goes to cut, I know that this fabric comes all the way to the corner and we're not going to have any like weird jagged edges. Make sure to change out your fine point blade before you go ahead to cut your Cricut. So I've got my rotary blade right here. Just going to put that in. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and pull this off. Okay. So once you pull off the Cricut, it may look like it didn't really cut. Um, but once you start pulling it up, you'll be able to see that it did. And there may be a couple areas that might have snagged a little bit. You can just take your scissors and kind of snip those. Even those little scissors are really good for this part. If you've got little scissors, if you've got big ones only that is totally fine. So once you remove the outer edge, you can go ahead and remove this fabric. I'm going to go ahead and take a piece of that terrazzo fabric from our excess fabric, and I'm going to lay it on here. So it needs to be at least four by 14 because that's how big our strap is. So I'm just going to cut this and I'm going to cut this end off. And listen, you could have cut this by hand. You can cut fabric by hand all day every day, but the Cricut just makes it look so clean. Like you can even see this is my scissor cut. This is my cut with the rotary blade. So like obviously it looks so much better, but this is just like a fun way to utilize your Cricut and another way that you may not have thought of before. And I just think it looks so clean. I love a good clean line whenever I'm sewing. It makes everything go together so much better. So I'm just going to braid this down. We're going to be cutting the four by 14 square on the same cotton settings, and we're still going to do more pressure just to make sure that it cuts all the way through. Let's go ahead and send this to the Cricut. Okay. Now that that's cut out, we're just going to go ahead and nip any places that might've stayed connected. And there is our strap piece. So before we cut the inner lining fabric, I'm going to go ahead and apply this matte vinyl fuse to the fabric, and then we'll cut it all together. You could cut the matte vinyl fuse first and also cut this like separately if you wanted to. Um, but I'm going to go ahead and iron it on and then cut it all at once. I did go ahead and cut a piece of this matte vinyl fuse that's going to be a little bit bigger than the piece of fabric that we're cutting. So I'm going to go ahead and lay out our fabric and you want to make sure that you press this really well. So I'm going to make sure to press this down really well before we go to adhere the matte vinyl fuse. If you've never used matte vinyl fuse before, which I was not super familiar with it before I used it for this project, but there's step-by-step instructions. I ripped them a little bit, but you can get the idea. Um, obviously there's like two layers. Whenever you open it, you'll be able to tell that there are layers to it. Um, but basically what it's telling us is, um, you're going to use the medium heat setting, which I've got mine set to that. Remove the vinyl fuse from the release paper and place the sticky side down onto the fabric. So let's go ahead and do that. And you can tell this is sticky and this is more like a smooth matte finish. I'm just going to lay this down here and I'm going to take my brayer just to make sure that it's down really good. Now this needs to go on the side of the fabric that you want to be showing on your inner lining. So this is the side that I want showing on my inner lining. So if I had a pattern fabric, like if I was using that terrazzo fabric on the inside, I would use this side up. So I would actually stick this like it would be this pattern side looking at me as I ironed it on. Make sure you don't have any threads or anything like that on it. And then you're going to take the paper that we just removed and lay it back on top of here. And we're going to iron over top of all of it. I'm just going to slowly work my way down to make sure that this adheres to the entire piece of fabric. And you can check as you go to make sure that it's going on smoothly and that you're not missing anything as well. We just don't want to iron directly on to the vinyl because it can melt it. And then once you've got that on there, you can go ahead and cut out all the way around. If you need to use your mat as kind of a guideline, you can do that as well. And then after you cut it, if you see any spots that have kind of lifted, just take that piece of paper and run the iron over it to make sure it's adhered very well. I'm going to cut this with the bonded side up. So whenever you put it on your mat, make sure you've got this adhesive facing up to you. And I'm going to go ahead and line this up and then I'm going to trim around the edges so it doesn't get caught in our machine. Okay. So what we're going to do is go back to this one. We're going to be using the same measurements here, but we are going to be using a different cut setting. So let's go to browse all materials and we're going to be doing light cotton two layers. I'm going to go ahead and select done and we're going to do more pressure and then we are going to send this to the Cricut. And then before you actually take the fabric off of the mat, go ahead and just make sure and see if it cut all the way through. Mine almost did, but I'm going to run it through another path just to make sure it cuts super clean. Okay. Now that that's cut out, we're going to go ahead and take off this excess fabric. If it's still caught in some areas, you can take your scissors. I just grabbed a true control knife because I feel like it's helping me really get there a lot quicker and just kind of cut off where there's tiny bits that are still connected. Most of this pretty well cut though. Okay. And then you're going to go ahead and pull that off. And now we've got all the pieces that we need to make our trash bag. So we've got our inner piece, our outer lining, and then we have our strap piece. Now that we've got all of our pieces cut, let's go ahead and get our sewing machine ready to put the pieces together. Okay. So before we get started sewing, what we're going to do first is take our outer fabric and we're going to fold the outer side of the fabric. So the non-pattern side, you guys can see this is my pattern side. This is the back. So I need to be looking at the back and I'm just going to match those shorter edges up together. If you want to, you can pin this. Um, I'm going to use these little clips just to hold it, but all we're going to be doing is sewing up these edges. So we're going to sew all the way up and down and we're going to repeat this process for our inner fabric as well. And then sew up each edge. So these pieces all have a quarter inch seam allowance. So I've got it lined up with the quarter inch. I'm going to go ahead and put the foot down and put the sewing needle in. And I'm just going to pull this a little bit taut and go ahead and sew all the way down each side. Okay. So we've got this first edge sewn and I'm going to do the same thing over here. I also have a quarter inch seam allowance on this side. Now I'm just trimming up, um, any loose threads just to keep everything super neat and clean. Okay. So what you'll have now is basically an open little pouch and it's going to be sewn up both of these edges. And we're going to repeat the same process for the inner lining. So for the inner lining, you're going to put the waterproof material on the inside. So we're going to fold the waterproof part so that it's touching each other. And I'm just going to line up that top edge. And then you can take your clips and pin this along the sides. And we're going to sew this exactly like we sewed the first piece. This will also have a quarter inch seam allowance and where the fabric is a little bit thicker, you might want to slow down when you're sewing, um, just to avoid breaking any needles or messing up. Again, I'm just going to cut off any excess threads just to keep everything nice and clean. And then you'll have the similar situation that you did with the first one. It's just like a little pouch and you'll have that waterproof lining on the inside. I didn't mention this earlier. Um, I guess I just assumed everyone already had some type of measuring tape on hand. Um, but you are going to need this. Um, we measured everything in design space, but for this particular step, we're just going to be needing to measure our corners. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to take a pencil and our little measuring tape. I'm going to open these this way. So you can see that those two seams are touching. And what I'm going to do is take these points and flatten them out. So it's going to be kind of like a triangle right here. And I'm going to measure an inch and a half from this point. And I'm going to make a mark with my pencil. So we're going to take all the way to the tip and then there's inch and a half mark right there. And then you can lay this across and just kind of draw a mark. We're going to be sewing right here. So just kind of mark it off. We're going to repeat that on this corner as well. And we're going to do it for the orange fabric also. Okay. And now we're going to take these to the sewing machine and sew right across each of those lines. Now that we've got these drawn on, I'm going to go ahead and pin them just so they stay in place better when we go to sew. And this, I'm using actual sewing pins to pin this part. And now we're just going to sew along those lines with the sewing machine. And then once you've sewn those corners, we're going to go ahead and obviously snip any excess thread. But I'm also going to cut the triangles off of the edges. So I'm going out about half an inch and I'm just going to trim that off. We're going to do the same thing with our outer fabric. Okay. So once you've cut those edges, you're going to end up with this type of situation. This is like a little bag. We're already starting to see, like, this was so quick. And I feel like we're starting to really see, like, the formation of the bag. So I'm going to keep my inner lining fabric the same direction, but I'm going to flip this one so that it's right side out now. And you can make sure and push those corners out really well. If you need to take, like, a weeding tool or some kind of sharp mechanism to point those corners out, you can do that. And next we're going to work on our strap and then we'll come back to this. So what we're going to do next is we're going to take our strap fabric. I'm going to flip it over and we're going to fold this long ways just like this. I have my little mini press on and I'm going to press this. Just make sure that it is square. Otherwise, when we go to sew, it's going to be off and it will bother you if you don't make it perfectly square. So we're just going to make sure those long edges stay lined up and I'm going to press this all the way up. And then I'm going to open this back up and I'm just going to fold one of these raw edges in. Make sure if there's any strings, you're just cutting it off as you go. I'm just going to fold that in just a little bit. I'm going to press that down and then what I'm going to do is fold the halves in half. So I'm going to fold this side in half and press it. So I'm going to bring it right there to the middle and then I'm going to repeat on the other side. And then I'm going to just fold it back again and re-press it down that middle line just to make sure it is really pressed. The better you press it, the easier it's going to be for you to sew. And then what we're going to do now that it's pressed, I've got the raw edge right here. I'm going to start there and I'm going to sew all the way down this edge. I'm going to sew right here. I'm not going to come off. So I'm going to start here. I'm going to come close to the bottom but not all the way. I'll turn it, sew across and turn it again and sew all the way back up off of that back edge. So I'm not going to go all the way to the edge where we folded over that top hem and and pressed it. I'm not going to go past that edge. What I'm going to do, I've got the needle in there now but I need it a little bit closer to the edge just not all the way. So I'm just going to turn it a couple times. Actually, I just needed to turn it one time. I'm going to lift my foot up and I'm just going to pull this right here. So it's still connected to the sewing machine. The needle is still through it and I'll put my foot right back down and I can keep sewing straight across. But I don't want to go too far because I don't want to go all the way to the edge. So once you get close, you can kind of stop using your foot pedal and you can use the manual knob and then I'm just going to lift my foot pedal, turn it again and put it back down and I'm going to sew all the way to the bottom edge where we started. And then we're just going to snip off any of this excess and our strap is nearly complete. Okay, so we've got our strap done and you all can see here how it's just squared off rather than on the raw end. It just kind of goes off the edges. You're not going to be seeing this so it's not going to matter. But what we're going to do is take that raw end and we're going to line it up to the raw edge of our outer lining. If you want, you can measure from the sides to the side. Like if you wanted it to be, let's say, let's see where it's at because I like what it looks like right there. So this is like, let's do two and a half. So that way whenever we go to connect this side later, we can measure two and a half from this side and make sure that we've got it lined up so it's like perfectly symmetrical. So let's double check our measurement. I want this to be from the edge. I want it to be two and a half. Okay, and then what we're going to do is just add a stitch right here just to connect this strap so we're not going all the way around just where the strap is. Okay, so you're going to end up with something like this. It's just going to be hanging down. It's going to look weird but we're going to put it together. What I'm going to do next is take the inner lining and I am going to tuck the outer lining inside of it. So I know it gets a little confusing. We're using inner and outer interchangeably, but I took the whole, the strap is in there and everything. So I'm lining these up seam to seam. I'm going to go ahead and pin that. Now you can use regular pins. You can use clips, whatever you are more comfortable with. And then I'm going to line this one up as well. I really like the clips especially for materials like the inner lining because sometimes the pins will scar the fabric and so these little clips help without puncturing the fabric so you can't really tell that there was pins there in the first place. And then I'm just going to pin all the way around as well as I can. And now I'm just going to sew all the way around this top edge very carefully. I will sew all the way around but I am going to leave a small opening like a four inch opening probably just somewhere so that we can turn this right side out. So I'll probably just put like a little gap right here and then we can turn it right side out after we're done and then close that hole. I'm also going to take off this little piece. It helps so I can kind of rotate my fabric around. You don't have to do that but it's just easier for me to sew that way. And then I can pull it up onto this little arm and kind of sew from there. Again this is a quarter inch seam allowance. So I'm just going to slowly pull all this fabric out. It may take a minute. Just be super careful not to tear your stitches. And I feel like my hole is a little bit small so I'm going to take my seam ripper and just get these last couple stitches. That way I've got a little bit more room. Okay and we can iron this out so it's it doesn't look so crinkly whenever we're actually using it. But I feel like it actually kind of looks like pleather or like a distressed leather. It looks pretty cool. So what you're going to do it's going to look weird and like this. I'm going to tuck this back into the outer and you're just going to push it all the way down. Make sure the corners completely fill out. Okay and then really we've got to add this top stitch and that'll sew that'll get our bag portion pretty much completed. And then we've got a couple finishing touches but we are making good progress. Before I sew this edge I'm going to take the mini press and just kind of iron it down a little bit just to kind of smooth things out. Just be careful not to melt that vinyl mat fuse. And you can see right here is where I have that hole but we're about to fix that. I'm going to go ahead and press it just a little bit and then I am going to pin it. I'm going to pin this all the way around to add the top stitch. Okay and then we're just going to add that all the way around. Whenever you're sewing this part make sure you pull that strap out and don't actually sew it again because it may still be tucked inside of your bag. So just make sure to pull it out. And then you've got your top stitch all the way around. So we only have a couple more things to do and then we will be done. What you're going to do next is you're going to take a piece of velcro. So you'll have like the scratchy side and the softer side. We're going to need one of each. I'm just going to cut this off and then what we're going to do this is basically going to connect back here. And earlier we measured from the edges to where to put this. So what I'm going to do is measure from from this seam and I'm going to measure to two and a half and I am going to put one of the pieces of velcro right there at that two and a half mark. And this is on the back side. The velcro is going to allow you to easily remove and install the bag whenever you need to change it. You can also just put like a like a Walmart bag or something like that in it. That way you can just take it in and out. You don't actually have to remove the entire trash bag but this does make it a little bit easier. And these are sticky so what we're going to do is add a stitch on it but I'm going to add velcro to this side of the strap. So we've got the strap right here and I'm just pulling it straight down and I'm going to add velcro right there and I'm going to add a simple stitch on this as well so that it doesn't come off. Okay so initially I was going to sew these but whenever I went to sew it the needle going through the tackiness on the back of the velcro it make it messes the needle up. It kind of bogs it up and it doesn't want to sew. So what I'm going to do is just take these off and put a little piece of fabric glue on the back of them and they should adhere just fine. So I've got this flexible stretchable fabric glue. This is permanent fabric adhesive. I'm just going to lift this up and apply a little bit underneath just a dot and I'm going to do it to this piece as well. You could also do a button that would be really cute so this is totally up to you. We're going to let that dry for a minute and while that dries we're going to hop into design space and we're going to add a cute little monogram on the front of this. Okay back in design space I'm just going to move these out of the way. We can even hide them. I'm going to add in a monogram. So we have a font called Click Clack and it's like a top writer font. It is so cute. We're just going to do three capital initials. So once that is there I'm going to just change this font and you can use whatever font. If you're more of like a script you could use a script font. You could do a full name would be cute and let's do this. Let's look at our trash bag and see how big we need to make it depending on where we want to put it and we'll just measure out where we're going to be placing it to make sure we don't make it too big or too small. So I was going to put it like on the bottom right corner. I feel like we don't want it to go all the way across but you could put it anywhere. Like you could put it right here in the middle. You could put it on the top center even. You could do just like one big letter on there. There's lots of opportunities to make this super cute but I think I'm going to try to keep it about four and a half inches. So I'm going to make a box and design space that's four and a half inches long and then we're going to fit the text inside that box. Okay I'm going to pull up the shapes. I'm going to unlock this and make it four and a half and then we just want to make sure that our letters don't go any wider than that. We almost had it perfect. Then we can delete our square and we are going to cut this out of orange fabric but not before we apply heat and bond to the back. That way these letters are going to permanently adhere to the fabric that they are on. Okay now that our bag is sewn what I'm going to do is apply a fabric applique letter to the front of it. You could use HTV for this which I think would be super cute and pretty quick but I like the vibe of like having the fabric on the fabric. I feel like it's going to look really good quality. So if you have a 12 inch mat sitting around go ahead and grab that and what we're going to do is apply some heat and bond to the back of our fabric. Now this is basically it will adhere to this fabric and then it will adhere to another fabric so it basically makes like an adhesive on the back of whatever that you put it on. So I'm going to go ahead and just cut off a small piece of this and I've got my iron on right now so it's nice and toasty and I'm going to cut off a piece of this fabric. Then we're going to take this so this is like a like a ridged side it's kind of textured. You're just going to lay this on your fabric and we're just going to take the iron and we are going to apply heat and then you'll see that there is a white backing on here. We're going to peel that off and you'll be able to see that this has a shiny it's very shiny so this part right here is actually going to adhere to our trash bag. I'm going to go ahead and trim up any of these loose edges just so they're out of the way and then I'm going to bray this onto our standard grip mat. You could use a fabric grip mat as well this is a very sticky standard grip mat that I'm using here but you could use a fabric grip and I'm going to be putting the shiny side up so I'm putting the heat and bond side up and we're going to need to mirror this in design space before we cut it. Once you've got your text how you want it go ahead and select make it and remember we're going to need to mirror it. I'm going to select continue and we are using the maker three today and then we're going to browse on materials and I'm just going to go back to the cotton. Now there is a cotton bonded setting and we are technically using bonded cotton but it uses the fine point blade and I just don't get really good results with that so I'm going to go ahead and stick to my guns. I'm going to use the cotton setting and I'm going to use more pressure using the rotary blade which we already have installed so I'm going to go ahead and send this through the Cricut. Okay so once those are cut out you can kind of pull them off the mat and there may be spots where it didn't cut all the way through. I'm just going to take my exacto knife and kind of separate those. You can use scissors for this as well just be super careful. So now that our letters are cut I'm going to apply them to the bag and I'm going to put them in this bottom left corner and by bottom left I mean bottom right so the bottom right corner I think I'm saying left because there's an L initial but you guys know what I mean. So bottom right and what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually adhere this L and then I'll do the other two base off of that one. So let's take these off you just have to apply a little bit of pressure and then we're going to line this one up right next to it and you can kind of hold it up in front of you to make sure that you're doing it right and you can just run your finger over and make sure that none of them are loose and then you can test out your velcro make sure it's on there good and we are completely done. What do you guys think about how it turned out? I am obsessed. I think this is so dang cute and so fun for your car. I mean super easy for you guys to take this velcro on and off so you can put it around your headrest. You could put it around your gear shift and obviously you can customize the letters that go on this. I feel like if you did these back to back you could make like 10 of these as gifts for Christmas presents. You could put like little like I feel like this would be super cute if you were gifting a 16 year old or something for their car. You could put like air fresheners and cute little things for their car in it. So there's just a lot of different ideas and ways that you can customize this and I really hope that you guys enjoyed it and were able to follow along and at least learn something new. We've got an amazing online community. We have a Facebook group. We've got a website full of tons of cut files and fonts for you all to use for all of your crafting needs and we would love for you guys to be a part of our community. Make sure if you aren't already that you subscribe to our channel and click the thumbs up if you like this and hit the little bell so every time that we post you all will get a notification on your phone and we cannot wait to see you in the next one. Bye guys!