by Jessi Wohlwend
I love drinking my morning coffee out of cute mugs, so I figured why not make my own mug with vinyl! It’s such a quick and easy project, and you can completely customize it however you want. Today’s tutorial will show you how to make your own mug with vinyl and a Cricut Explore Air in just a few minutes!
I’ve been having so much fun trying out my new Cricut Explore Air! If you missed my first two tutorials you can find them here and here. For today’s project I felt like I had my feet under me a little bit, so I used the Cricut Design Space to design my own project from scratch instead of using a pre-made Make It Now project! It’s actually really simple to do, and I’ll show you how!
Make Your Own Mug With Vinyl
- 10 minutes (time spent doing stuff)
- 5 minutes (time spent waiting around)
- 15 minutes (total project time)
Tools
Materials
- outdoor adhesive vinyl in whatever colors you’d like (I used silver, slate grey, and dark blue)
- transfer tape
- “Baby it’s cold outside” design (you can find my Cricut design here)
- rubbing alcohol
- cotton balls
Instructions
Start by opening up Cricut Design Space in your browser, and start a new project. Click the “Add Text” button on the left and type your text into the new text box. On the right, under the “Edit” tab you can change the size and font and alignment of your text if you wish. I changed the font to Wildflower.
Then I clicked “Insert Images” and found a cute snowflake flourish that I liked and inserted it. I resized the image so that it would fit on the mug and placed it below my text.
And that was it; it’s ready to cut! Just click the Go button, set the dial on your Cricut machine to Vinyl, and the app will walk you through the rest of the steps for loading and cutting each separate layer of vinyl.
While your vinyl is cutting, use a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol to clean your mug where you plan to put your vinyl. The rubbing alcohol will remove any grease and dirt from your fingers so that the vinyl sticks better.
Once your vinyl is cut, weed away any background vinyl using the weeding tool, leaving the letters and design on the backing paper.
Then trim a piece of transfer tape to the same size as your vinyl design. Remove the backing paper from the transfer tape and stick the transfer tape onto your vinyl design. Use the scraper tool to really press the transfer tape onto the vinyl so that it sticks.
Gently peel up the transfer tape; it should stick to the vinyl well enough to lift the letters up off the backing paper. Then position the vinyl design on your mug, using the scraper tool again to really stick the vinyl letters to the mug.
Once the vinyl is really stuck to the mug, gently peel back the transfer tape, leaving the vinyl letters on the mug. And you’re done!
Fill it with your favorite hot beverage and enjoy!
I suggest hand-washing your mug; the dishwasher can be really rough on your dishes and the vinyl letters may start to peel off after repeated washing.
Shop this project:
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Disclosure: I received an Explore Air™ machine from Cricut in exchange for my participation in this campaign, and my honest discussion of their products. But I am LOVING my new machine, I’m excited to learn more about what it can do, and all opinions in this post are 100% my own. I would never write a post about something I didn’t think was useful or interesting for you guys, and Practically Functional will only publish sponsored posts for companies or products I love and believe in! 🙂
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.
