OMG! Your Cricut Can Do Wood Burning - Here's How!

Hey guys! Welcome back to the Maker's Gonna Learn YouTube channel. My name is Alisha, a craft producer here at Maker's Gonna Learn, and today I'm going to show you guys how to wood burn with your Cricut. So here are all the projects that we're going to need to complete this project. We're going to be making a cute little Easter tag with some carrots on it and a name. So we have these little wooden tags right here. This is going to be our base. We've also already went ahead and cut our design. How cute is that? This is all Maker's Gonna Learn text files as well as cut files that we're using. And then I've got the Minwax Early American Stain. This is probably my favorite color of stain that we use and also brand. I love the Minwax brand. You're going to need like an 80 grit sanding block. I've got yarn. You don't have to use orange and green, but I'm going to show you guys a cute little yarn trick to make the top of it look like a carrot, which is super cute. You're going to need gloves for stain as well as for this, and you're going to need a heat gun. If you've got an embossing heat gun, you're probably going to want to use a bigger, like hotter one. So we like this one a lot. And then you're also going to need your torch paste. This is like going to be the secret to all of your Cricut wood burning projects. This is going to literally make your project into a wood burning masterpiece. It comes with a little spatula, but we're going to actually use a little makeup sponge, and then you're going to need a burnishing tool. And that's it. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and go on to makersgonnalearn.com. I'm going to select cut files, and then we're going to search Easter, and that's going to pull up our carrot cut file. We've also got tons of other cut files that you can choose from. And if you wanted to use another Easter file, you totally could, but we're going to be using this happy Easter with carrots, and we're just going to go ahead and download that. And then I'm also going to download a font, and we're going to be using Mary Catherine font. That's the name of the font we're going to be using today. We have thousands of fonts for you to choose from. So we're going to be using this Mary Catherine font right here. Go ahead and download that, and then you can pull them up in here if you want to. Make sure download it if it's a zipped file, which this font is. We're going to go ahead and click that to unzip it, and then we're going to click again and make sure that we install the font. After that, we're going to go back into design space, and we are going to upload our carrot image first. And we're going to pull in the SVG because we're going to be cutting. We're not doing a print and cut. We just need the SVG because we're only cutting. So go ahead and upload that, and you can click it and add it to your canvas. So we're going to go ahead and ungroup everything. So I've selected it. I'm going to select ungroup, and then I'm going to select the green only. And then we're going to drop down here to contour, and we're going to get rid of the happy Easter. We only want the green stems, and you'll have to go through and select all these, or you could have just hit add all contours and clicked on just the stems, and that would have worked too. So now we've only got the stems, only have the carrots, and we just need to plug in our text. So we're going to go ahead and type out the name, and we're going to change that font to Mary Catherine. Go right down here. This is the font we're going to be using. Super cute. One of our faves. Whenever we pull that font in here, the letters are kind of close together, so we're going to space them out a little bit just so it looks better. I think that is good right there. It's kind of just whatever you prefer, and then we're going to make it as big as the carrots. After you get your text to the size that you want, you're going to click and drag, and we're going to weld everything together. This is going to put it all on the same mat. That way it cuts from the same stencil vinyl, and then we're also going to resize this to our tag. So depending on where you're planning to put this, you need to make sure and measure and then change up here at the top the sizes of your project. So our tags are five by two and three quarters. They do go at an angle at the top, so I don't want to make it super tall. So let's go ahead and adjust this to two and three quarters because we know that's the width, and you can zoom in. So our width is two and three quarters, and it made it about 3.9 in height, and then after you do that, you're going to go ahead and make it. We're going to select on mat, continue. So once you pull it over here, we're going to be cutting this on stencil vinyl. You don't need to mirror it when you're using stencil vinyl. It's just like a regular permanent vinyl, and you're going to continue. Select your Cricut, and once that loads, you're going to select your material, which is going to be stencil vinyl. Now if you only have permanent vinyl on hand, you can use it. Just be very careful when you're using wood. It may pull up your wood a little bit, so make sure you really really sand it down super good before you decide to use permanent vinyl. We're going to be using the stencil vinyl though, and you can keep your pressure at default, and then you'll go ahead and send it through your Cricut. We've got our Cricut stencil already cut out, so I'm going to go ahead and take the backer off. Just be very careful when you're pulling that off and throw that away, and then we're just going to line this up centrally. You can kind of see the tag through the back of the stencil, so I'm just lining her name up with that bottom edge, and just kind of pay attention to the tops of the carrots that they don't go off the actual edge of the tag, and then I'm going to use a burnishing tool, and I'm going to put that on there really good, and then we're going to go ahead and take that transfer vinyl off of the top. You just want to make sure that your stencil isn't coming up with your transfer tape as you peel it off. It tends to a little bit, especially with stencil vinyl, so you just have to be super careful. So once you've got your transfer tape pulled off, we're going to go ahead and put on gloves, and we're going to apply our torch paste. So I'm going to go ahead and open our torch paste, and I've got a little makeup sponge here that we can use. Make sure you're wearing gloves and protective eyewear for this, and I'm also going to use our little spatula just to kind of scoop this out and put it onto our makeup brush. We don't want a super heavy coat of this. We want it to be nice and even, and if there is any excess, we can use our squeegee to kind of scrape off any excess. I'm also making sure my stencil is stuck all the way down. That way, none of this torch paste seeps up underneath our stencil. So we're just going to apply this with a sponge, and once you completely cover it, we're going to let it sit for about two minutes. So once you've applied your torch paste, make sure it's a good even coat. If you need to use your squeegee to go through, you can kind of scrape off the excess if you need to. I use this sponge to kind of thin it out really good, and then we're just going to go ahead and take off this stencil. If you need to, you can use your weeding tool to get the middles of your letters out. Once your stencil's removed, we're going to let this sit for two minutes, and then when that's completed, we'll go ahead and apply the heat. So we're going to go ahead and apply the heat to our tag. Make sure you keep it about six to ten inches away. It'll take a little bit longer, but it won't burn the actual wooden part of the tag. It'll only burn where we've applied the torch paste, so you just want to make sure to keep a good distance. Once you've completely burned this, if you need to, go in with some masking transfer or any kind of like tape, and you can put this on top of your tag and just kind of rub over top of it and then peel it off, and it's going to get off any extra soot. So we've got a little bit of black around here. You want to do that before you stain it because it may smear on your tag, and then you can just kind of take your finger and make sure that there's no extra anywhere before you go in with your stain. Now that we've got the soot off of our tag, I'm going to go ahead and pop this stain open, and once again, we're using early American, which is really pretty. You could also do like an antique white. You could do a gray would be really pretty for Easter, but we're just going to use the early American and just make sure you get off all the excess, and we're just going to go ahead and stain, stain, stain. I'm just using a paper towel for this. You could use an old t-shirt, whatever you have laying around, and then you can let that sit for a couple minutes and then just wipe off the excess stain. So it's going to look something like that. Once you've got your stain done, we can go ahead and do our twine. Now you don't have to do the orange and green twine. I just thought it would be a fun way to incorporate the carrot colors since we didn't really incorporate them on our actual tag. So we're going to go ahead and cut a pretty good length of this orange. This is what it's going to hang from, and I'm just going to tie a knot in this, and then I'm going to kind of double this up just like this, and then we're going to weed it through our tag. We're going to go from the back into the front, and then I'm just going to grab this knot, and you'll get something like this. And then what we're going to do next is cut some of this green off about the same length, and we're just going to tie this in a bow. I'm going to tie it just like if you were tying your shoes. I'm going to tie it right there at the base, and I have this doubled around too, so it's a little bit thicker. We've got a little green bow, and then you can just cut this right here, and there you have it. What did you guys think about wood burning with the Cricut? I feel like this is such an easy, fun way to customize your wood projects. It's perfect for customizing your Easter baskets, and I feel like there's so many different creative opportunities that you can use when you're wood burning. If you're interested, you can check out the Maker's Going to Learn website. We've got tons of cut files, tons of fonts for you to choose from, and we would love for you to be a part of our community. If you like this video, make sure to like it and subscribe to us so you never miss any of our crafts. We love having you guys. Thank you. Bye.