CRICUT BASSWOOD HACK: Cut Oversized Wooden Names With Cricut!

hello everyone welcome back to the makers going to learn YouTube channel in this video I'm going to be teaching you all how to take Cricut Basswood and make an oversized wooden sign now this can be a sign with a name that can go over a baby's crib or in your child's bedroom you can make it a last name to be a decorative piece in your home there are so many different ways that you can go with this I am actually going to be making this sign today for Ruby's little play coffee company so that is what we're going to be doing the results are absolutely amazing and I really think you're going to enjoy this so let's go over ahead and talk about the supplies that you're going to need let me start off by saying this project is for our friends that have a maker or a maker three and that is because you are going to need a Cricut knife blade to complete this project we are going to be cutting Cricut Basswood specifically the 1 6 mm Basswood so you are going to have to have a Cricut knife blade or have a machine that has the ability to use an Adaptive tool for this project next up we have the Cricut Basswood this is a great material to use if you are wanting to create wooden projects we love using Cricut Basswood but with the Cricut Basswood you are going to have to have a strong grip mat because this is a very thick material but on top of the strong grip mat you're also going to need painters tape and that is to take tape your material down when your knife blade is cutting there's actually a couple things we're going to be using the painters tape for so painters tape is very very important for this project um masking tape painters tape either one will work we just prefer the scotch blue painters tape next up you are going to need some type of super glue we love using the DAP rapid fuse because it truly only takes about 30 seconds for this to hold our project together now something that we don't have on the table that you may want to have is some wood fillers just to fill in your seams if you need it if not I think the DAP will do just fine and then finally I do have a sanding block and this is to sand your letters once they are cut by your machine and a true control knife because you are going to be cutting your tape um and it's going to just come in really handy so here in design space you can see we have our little bab's Coffee Co already sized here but I'm going to show you exactly how we're going to do that from start to finish the two fonts that we're going to be using is vintage jeans and then this one is fierce SS these are makers going to learn fonts and I'm going to show you how we can download those into design space and on top of that if you are not a maker going to learn member you can sign up for free grab your free trial to our website we are a membership site where we bring you thousands of cut fils hundreds of fonts and new fonts and cut files every month as well as inspiration education and motivation to get your Cricket out and start learning how to use it now the two fonts that we're going to be using is fierce SS so all we have to do is type in Fierce this is the one here to download the font what we're going to do is click that arrow pointing down and the next one is vintage jeans so we're just going to search for this one as well and then once again to download you are going to click arrow pointing down now one thing I want to make clear with this project you do have to have a font that is thicker now vintage jeans is not super thick but it is thick enough that we can make it work and it's really going to depend on what top or what your sign is going to say so if we go back to our fonts I'll give you some examples of what fonts will work and what fonts will not so if you want all of your letters to be together obviously a font like this that is not a cursive font is not going to work it will work but you're going to have to place every letter separately if you want a cursive font I will show you let's go to our Styles and we will go to handlettered because a lot of handlettered is cursive fonts so some examples of some good fonts to use and not good fonts first of all willpower I love this font by itself for this project this font will not work it is a very thin font and it's just not going to be one that works very well now coming on down joyful has areas that are very thick it does have thinner areas but it does have very thick areas this one would be a perfect font for this Max Patch even better so Betty be abs absolutely not so the font that you choose for this project does matter once again you need to choose something that has a thicker area to work with rather than something that is skinny all the way through tulip way too skinny up in the air definitely could work so once you have chosen your fonts and you've downloaded them onto your computer we're going to come up here to the right hand side we are going to unzip both of our fonts that was our first one unzip our second one once those are unzipped we're going to doubleclick them install them onto our computer and then from there once you have them installed we're going to go back to design space if you are working on something make sure that you save your project and then for design space to recognize the new fonts that you've uploaded onto your computer you're we're going to go to view and reload design space we're going to save our project and then what's going to happen is it is going to now recognize all of those new fonts that you have downloaded so once we have reloaded what we are going to do is we are going to start typing out our words so I'm going to let's just go ahead and we're just going to hide all of this and we will start from from the beginning now you may be wondering Lauren what is that square right there that is very important I will get to that let's kind of scoot over to the side and let's start adding our fonts and our words so we're going to grab a text box I'm going to go to our system fonts our first one was vintage jeans here we are going to make it pretty large and then we are going to type in little babes leave it like that for right now another text box we are going over to Fierce so SS for this one and this one is going to say Coffee Co and then bring that down and size that up as well that is a little large so you need to measure the area that you are working with for example if I wanted to put something which of course this is not a good representation because it is we do have these lines on this board but let's just say I wanted to put something that is would fit all the way across you need to measure that area so let's just say for example this was the area we're looking at about 35 in and then you want to know about how tall you want it to be so let's say you know 35 by 12 may be what you're looking at so what you're going to do you'll go back into design space here you can see we're right around 21 in in length right here so we need to if we were wanting to fit it within the 35 you would scale it up and then scale up your other as well now it is going to be the next step is very important remember I said that this was important that we needed to bring this in and really double check that this is because this 6x2 square is a representation of our 6x2 piece of Basswood now if you can find the thick Cricut Basswood in larger than 6x 12 then obviously you have more room to work with but for this certain parts of certain fonts will have to fit within the 6x2 for example this L probably just needs to be by itself and when we zoom in we see that the L is not going to fit on that 6X 12 so what I'm going to do is I'm going to size it down just enough so that that L will fit on the 6x12 piece of Basswood and you're probably going to have to zoom in a little more now right now my eye is within that space that's okay I'm going to show you how we can fix that but I would probably size it down just a little bit more to be on the safe side and I think that will work okay now let's Zoom back out I want to double check my b as well so I'm going to bring this over my B fits perfectly within the the 6X 12 so we have our little babes sized how we want it how large we want yet and now you want to size your Coffee Co to fit the same once you have done that we are going to pull the Coffee Co down and I'm going to come back up here double click this and I'm going to separate the second half of the word little from the L also set separate from the be and I'll have to zoom out some more and this is this is very important and then separate the Bee from babes okay so it's going to look like this just bear with me from this portion we are going to go to Advanced and ungroup to lines so now we have the L the second half of little the B by itself for babes and here but they are all the same size font and that is why we size it before we ungroup to lines very important so our L we know is going to fit on our 6X 12 piece of Basswood our B is going to fit as well and then Coffee Co what I would do and I'll show you exactly what I would do to that later but we also know that all of those letters will fit somehow on there as well so the next part is we have to figure out how to fit little babes on here so the next thing that you want to do is you want to separate your words now this one in particular I actually could fit these if I rotated this 90° these will fit on this 6X 12 piece of Basswood but if you run into an issue where it doesn't fit on the 6x2 I want to show show you how you need to separate your lettering so and this is why it is very very important for you to have a thicker font so I'm going to zoom in and we can see that probably need to separate this between the T and the L but like I don't want this part of the L out by itself I want the L and the E to be um attached together but I also want to have I want to slice it in a thicker area of the font so what I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate this just a little bit bring it over and here you can see that if I slice this here the L and the E will stay together right and then the it t over here plus a little bit of the L will will will also be together so before I slice it I'm going to duplicate this rectangle over here and then I'm going to select both of these and slice okay so we need to get rid of that get rid of that and then this is over here so what's going to happen is when the Basswood is cut it's going to cut this and then it's going to cut this as well and then we can come back in and wood glue these back together okay so that is why it is important for you to choose a thicker font now like I said earlier I could very easily take the easy route with this rotate this 90 90° and you can see that this half of the word it actually fits fits on the 6X 12 piece of Basswood so like I said if your font fits great you can do it that way if it doesn't this is how you want to slice it and I'm going to show you how to reattach it later on so again I'm going to show you exactly how to do it with the bab's portion so I'm just going to fit it here you can zoom in have it sliced at an area that is you know a pretty decent area to slice at you don't want you never want to slice something like that where you're cutting off this portion of the a or the E you want to slice at a junction of your text like that and then come in here and select them both and slice from there you can get rid of your other unwanted sections and you have all of your words separated where they need to be but can still attach and here you can see we'll bring the be back in for babes we'll bring the L back in for little and you can see it still lines up beautifully now if you do decide to cut a non script or a non- cursive font like this where none of the letters are touching my best advice to you is to go go ahead and go to Advanced once you have your sizing correct and ungroup to letters what this is going to do is it's going to allow you to really move and manipulate your letters around to get the most out of the area that you are working on once you have done all of that you are ready to go to make it once you have hit make it normally you can change your material size there is not a 12 by six that you can change it to but we know that we have to fit this within the 6x12 area so what I'm going to do I'm actually going to select both of these I'm going to move these to matte two for the time being because I don't want them on this first mat and I am going to go back to mat one I'm going to move this one as well to mat to and I'm just going to start cutting the letters that I know that I need which is two o's and two FS now I'll be honest with you guys I did already cut a good majority of this because it does take so long but what I did is for example this is an O and I also need that o I'm going to move those back to the first one so what I did is I manipulated all of my letters for example I moved this F like down you can do this and make them fit better that way if you want to but I moved as many things as I could to the mat to cut so if I needed to cut again I could go back to two and let's say I needed to cut the second half of the es in the babes I can move this back to one and just make sure that it fits within the 6 in Mark which you can see here it does it's all about manipulation of your layers so we can fit this in here and let's say if we need to go back you know you can grab the ease whatever but you are going to cut all of the words and what I did is I kept moving them back and forth to mat one and and once I was done cutting I would move everything here to mat two and what I needed to mat one so that is just how I worked around that because there is not a 6x12 material size you all can make it work however you want um I'm going to move this one back to two because I do not need to cut it and then from here we are going to cut the rest of the sign that we need so what I'm doing is I'm laying my Basswood down on my mat and before I send it to my machine I'm going to make sure that I add my painters tape to make sure it stays down now this is some pretty thick painters tape I would highly suggest getting the thinner painters tape this is just what we have so I'm just going to make sure that this gets taped down really well and then if it is over a little bit on your mat you can either trim it off or you can fold it over to trim it off you can just take your true control knife and run it along the edge of your mat right here cutting the excess off but you do want to make sure you tape all the way around sides and the top and the bottom once you have done that and it is taped down really well what we are going to do over here in our machine we are going to take our fine point blade out and we're going to go ahead and add in our knife blade because we know that we're going to need our knife blade for this and then in design space I'm going to hit continue browse material and I'm going to search Basswood and we are using the 1.6 mm or the 16th of an inch thick we're going to select done it is going to prompt you to use your knife blade and then over here we're also going to have to move our star wheels all the way over to the side because the star wheels are going to snag on that Basswood if they are where it is going to be going through your machine once we have done that we are going to load in our mat and then press the flashing Cricut [Music] button now just a reminder this does have a very long cut time and we're only cutting two o's two fs and a little period so keep that in mind if you have a lot more on your mat to cut it is going to have quite a long cut time currently we are looking at 13 minutes for that to finish cutting so in the meantime let's go ahead and go over head and let me show you exactly how to place your letters together so here you can see we have our little babes separated exactly where we sliced it into Z space and I'm going to show you exactly how to place these back together so that we can hang them on the wall first thing you're going to want to do is grab some tape now I'm just going to use painters tape today because I feel like it's going to give me the best results and just hold it in place and really that's all we're looking at this to do is just be a placeholder for us so I'm just going to lay that down here and the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my second half of my letters and I'm going to line it up here on the tape so that it fits together now after I've done that I'm just going to come in with my true control knife and I'm going to cut the excess of this tape like that cut that there and then cut down here now if you want to you can come back in here and trim this up a lot better I'm actually going to be taking this tape off in a little after I glue it anyway after tomorrow after it completely dries so it's not that big of a deal you just want it to hold it together and be able to bend and open up so once again I'll show you and I'll just take a piece of this tape here that I had extra from the top portion we're going to do the same thing with the babes we're going to lay that down and then we are going to place the B and the E together line it up and then we are just going to cut this excess here so what I'm going to do right now is I'm actually going to add some dap glue on this seam and our dap glue is the lid is glued shut so I'm just going to act I'm going to take a weeding tool y'all know us around here work smarter not harder waste not want not so I'm not wasting this dap glue I'm just taking it and running it along this seam and then I'm going to hold it together yes there is some excess glue here but we're just going to wipe that off and this is a fast drying glue so we don't have to sit and wait we just have to sit and hold this together and it will it will hold what I love about this glue so much is that it really does hold in about 30 seconds or so you should be able to let go and then let it finish curing and you can see it held pretty well already so we're just going to let that sit and let that cure some more and then we can come back in and sand that off so now we're going to do the same thing to this bottom portion just going to grab some run it along here now you don't have to use dap glue you can use super glue I have used gorilla super glue before that has worked really well so once again not with your finger do not spread this glue with your finger use a paper towel and hold it together for about 30 seconds once your glue has dried you may just want to come back in here with a sanding block and just sand that off because when we go to add paint we're definitely going to want this area sand Ed pretty [Music] [Music] well [Music] y'all what do you think this is such a fun project and I love how I can take one big word and slice it up into more digestible pieces and then put it back together so that we can make a beautiful piece of wall art if you plan on recreating this drop me in the comments what you plan on doing and if you're new here make sure you hit that thumbs up on this video subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can get notified every time we get crafty not only that if you want to recreate this and use the fonts that we use today make sure you click that first link down below we have a free 7-Day trial for you guys where you get 20 plus downloads from our website you get to try us out for free you can determine whether we are the right fit for you but I really think that once you get in there you're going to absolutely love it I mean what do you have to waste it's free right make sure you click that link down below check us out free for 7 days and once again let me know what you plan on making with your Cricut knife blade and Basswood I will see you guys in the next one