How To Etch Stainless Steel

Hello everyone, it's Rachel here back again with another amazing video from Makers and I Learn, your ultimate die cutting community. Today is all about etched tumblers and etched stainless steel. Now there is a lot of hype around trying to etch stainless steel and one of the big questions is, why can't I just use etch-all or etching cream or glass etch or something like that? Well, that is because glass and stainless steel are completely different. To actually etch stainless steel, you need a special product called ferric chloride. Now this is what we're going to be using today. This is the secret ingredient, if you will, so I cannot wait to share with you how you guys can start etching all of your stainless steel. Now today we're going to be doing it on a tumbler, so if you have any questions, be sure to let us know in the comments below and we can't wait to dive into this amazing tutorial. First of all, if you do not know who we are or what we do at Makers and Learn, I urge you to click the very first link in the description below to see what you're missing. Not only do we have thousands of cut files and hundreds of fonts, but we also have access to a member-only Facebook group, free commercial licensing, amazing training if you're a Cricut beginner, free courses, and more. Definitely check that out if you haven't already. We would love to help you become a well-rounded and confident crafter. I would also like to start this video off by thanking Michael over at Mr. Crafty Pants and giving him a big shout out. He came out with an incredible kick butt video all about this a couple of months ago, so while we're a little bit late to the game, we were testing and making sure everything was perfect and doing our research and we want to thank him for his incredible video as well. I will link him down below for you guys. Now as far as supplies go, you're going to need the normal things. So we have our Cricut, some Cricut tools, a Cricut mat, and vinyl. The vinyl we're using today is actually Oracal 631. If you don't know the difference between Oracal 651 and Oracal 631, it is the adhesive. So Oracal 631 is actually less strong than Oracal 651 and the reason why we want that today is because while this is a stencil and we don't want anything getting under it, we also don't want to have to use every ounce of strength in our body to remove it from our tumbler. We're going to clean this thing and make sure it is perfect and ready for our vinyl. So I'm going with 631 today to be a little bit easier to remove after the fact. We also have a poster board here on our table. This is going to protect our work surface and make sure we just kind of stay inside the lines. We also have our tumbler. This tumbler is from 651. We had it here. You can also use the Ozark Trail ones from Walmart. You can use Yeti, but I will urge you if you have never tried this, use it on a cheaper one. So use it on one of those $7 Ozark Trail ones. Make sure you do some testing. You don't want to do this first on your Yeti tumbler. Please don't do that. We also have a roll of tape and the only purpose this serves is to hold our cup right where we want it. So don't think we're going to be taping anything up. This is just like a stabilizer for our cup. So whatever you can find to do that. If you have a piece of foam you can carve out or something like that would be perfect. We just want our tumbler to sit still for us. We have our secret ingredient, our ferric chloride. I always have problems saying it, so I have to read it just about every time. So I will link this down below, although I do have to let you guys know with this being so popular, it's Slim Pickens on Amazon. So I will actually link several links for you guys down below of this product and if one's out of stock, just keep clicking them. Hopefully one will be in stock for you guys. Also brand doesn't really matter. So any ferric chloride will work. So I will link a bunch of different types and brands down below. Any of them will work just fine. Next you're going to need cotton balls. So this is the cotton ball method and we have tested a lot of different methods such as dunking it all the way in the ferric acid, using paper towels, using q-tips, using cotton balls and this is our favorite. It's also Michael's favorite. Again at Mr. Crafty Pants he did this version as well and much like him we found a ton of success with it. So that is what we're going to teach you to do today. We also have baking soda. Now this is not a part of the actual process, but this is very necessary after it is all done. So with all of our used cotton balls and onto our tumbler, what this is going to do is kind of absorb that acid basically. It's going to absorb all of this ferric chloride and make it a little bit safer for us. And speaking of safety, make sure you take all of the personal protection precautions that you can. Mask up, glove up, put some goggles on, open the door, open the window, do it outside. Do every single thing you can to keep yourself healthy and safe through this because your health is our number one priority. Also you're going to need a bowl. So this is just a bowl that I grabbed from the kitchen. This is what we're going to be able to put all our used cotton balls in. We also have some paper towels and some rubbing alcohol and I think that that just about does it. If I have any last minute entries of products I will definitely let you guys know, but this is about all that we need to create a tumbler here and to etch it. And without further ado we're going to go ahead and hop into design space and I'm going to share with you guys the fun little quote we made using one of our fonts over at Okay guys, so the font that we're using today is called Westland. This is one of our new fonts over at Maker's Gonna Learn and it is a cute one. And I think it's me inspired, quite like Pinterest. I know that you guys can relate with me. So I just searched some fun craft phrases and quotes over on Pinterest and saw this one much like the kill them with kindness, kill them with craftiness. So I really liked that phrase. I thought it was super fun. So all that we did was go over here and grab us a text box and we're going to go to system fonts because we have already downloaded this and uploaded it to design space. So now we're going to type out kill them and then I clicked enter with enter again craftiness. And as far as the spacing and everything goes, you can size this up while you're doing this. The first thing I did was take the line spacing down. So what this is going to do is just bring those lines closer together. So that's about how I like that. And then now I'm going to actually ungroup all of these because I want this kill them to be way closer together. So take that and I always use my arrow keys here and then you can take those and attach them together. Thank goodness for that undo button guys. Take that word, attach it together and then take craftiness and attach it together. Now at this point you'll take all of these. You can tell that they're all selected by looking in your layers panel. They're all selected and now what I'm going to do is click align up here. Align and we're going to do align center horizontally. And now you can see it just kind of locks those into place right where you want them. And now guys I'm going to take all of this together and attach it all. And that's about it guys. Other than this, what you're going to want to do is size it onto your tumbler. Now you have to be super careful because with a tumbler like this, since this is a curved surface, you do not want to have it be super long because then you can go ahead and start distorting your words and we don't want that. So ours can be about four by four and here we have three and a half by three. Now how we did that was we're going to make the width three and a half. So we're going to go over here and type out 3.5 enter and as you can see this one is a little bit longer. So all we did for that is take this up here, unlock it, and pull it down a little bit. That's all that we did. So do that to your liking. Just don't do it too much to where of course you start distorting those words. Just be mindful as you do it and again play with that until you like it. And then this is what we came up with three and a half by three. This is what we like. This is what's going to look super good on our tumbler. Now once you have all this attached and ready to go, you're going to go ahead and click make it. And one thing we must do is because this is going to be a stencil that we're going to etch, we want to have a lot of wiggle room around the edges of our design here. So we're going to click our design and we're going to move it around and what we're going to do is we're going to place it right about here. This looks pretty good. You just want a good amount of space all the way around your project. Now we're going to click continue and we're going to be using premium vinyl today. I'm going to leave that on default pressure and we'll go ahead and allow our Cricut to cut this out. Okay our vinyl is cut out and right off the bat I can see that it has moved a little dot to our eye. So I'm just going to pop that back in place and weed this. I'm going to burnish it first. You guys know we always burnish everything. Burnish it really really well and now I'm going to go ahead and trim. Now you want to give a little bit more space than normal when you trim this because again this is going to be a stencil. So we're going to take that and remove the excess and I'm actually going to burnish again guys. Don't come at me. You guys know I always burnish so so much. So now we're going to go ahead and weed out the insides of these letters because again this is a stencil. So we're going to remove all of this and now guys I'm adding some transfer tape here. Now I don't add it over the entire design. You can tell that I'm just adding it over like the actual words. This to me is easier when I'm doing anything with a stencil. So feel free to do it however you like but this really helps me personally. So I'll burnish that down really well and now we're going to remove the vinyl from the mat. Perfect and now we're going to set that to the side because we have to prep our tumbler here. So I'm going to take the lid off. Let's set it down and we're going to be using paper towels and alcohol to make sure that this tumbler is really nice and clean. Now we're just doing it up here on the top so you don't have to of course clean the entire tumbler just the area that you are going to be applying this ferric chloride. So now we're going to go ahead and turn this over and I'm going to burnish again. You guys know you cannot over burnish and now you're going to remove the vinyl here just like so and it looks great. So now we're going to apply this down. Be very mindful where you place it and once you get where you want it guys you can just go ahead and burnish all that vinyl down. You can use your burnishing tool if you want to. The most important thing is that you get all of the letters down really well. You want a great seal around all those letters and once you have that you can go ahead and peel up this transfer tape here. Perfect. Now we're going to straighten everything up here and get started on our ferric chloride and again do all of the precautions. Take all the precautions that you want to take and I'm not going to lie to you all this part is going to be a bit time consuming so just bear with the process here. We have our ferric chloride and we have our cotton balls right here and we have a bowl. This is where we're going to put our cotton balls after we use them. So I'm going to take the top off of this and what we're going to do guys is take a cotton ball, we're going to dab it in some of the ferric chloride and we're going to dab it onto our stainless steel tumbler. So we're going to take this just like that there it is and we're going to dab it. Now make sure you get the entire design. This is super important. You don't want to miss any of this design and don't think well is this it like is this all I'm going to be able to do. No we're going to actually do this several times over the course of about I would say 15-20 minutes. You want to make sure you get every bit of the design. Don't have too much of this ferric chloride on your cotton ball. You just want a good amount. Make sure you're giving some pressure too to get really in all those little nooks and crannies and then just like the other ones you go ahead and place that in your bowl. Okay guys we are all done with our ferric chloride and now what we're going to do is take some baking soda and we're going to put some baking soda on our cotton balls. That's going to absorb and kind of neutralize that ferric chloride and then we're also going to put some of this straight onto our tumbler. We want this to really absorb there for us and we can go ahead and rub this in a little bit and now guys we'll go ahead and peel all this off. You might want a weeding tool or two handy and guys at this point you'll go ahead and wash this cup really well under some water. So go ahead and rinse that off and guys all we did was wash this off with some water, wipe it clean with some paper towels and pop the top back on and look how cute it turned out. Well guys I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial. I really had a lot of fun making it for you guys. If you enjoyed it give this video a thumbs up and go ahead and subscribe to get notified about more crafty videos just like this one. If you have any questions about this process please go ahead and leave us a comment in the links below and don't forget to check out the very first link in the description below to see what you're missing by not being a member of Makers and Learn. Thanks so much for watching guys and we'll see you in the next video. Bye!