Santa and Reindeer Garland

A few weekends ago when we taught a class at the Pinners Conference (see all about that HERE and HERE) we were lucky enough to meet up with a new vinyl company called Daily Craft Vinyl.  We were so excited about all their beautiful vinyl and killer prices that we couldn’t leave without some vinyl in hand!  We have been dying to try out heat transfer vinyl and this was a perfect opportunity.  Once we decided on the project, we did what any of us do when trying something new……we Googled it.  Ha!  We read through a few tutorials and found THIS one from PracticallyFunctional.com and THIS one from DailyCraftVinyl.com to be the most helpful.  But today, we will share with you our very first heat transfer vinyl experience!  It’s kind of like a love story because we are now in love with heat transfer vinyl, and we’re pretty sure it loves us too. 😉

Okay so here’s what you’ll need to make this Santa and Reindeer garland:

• Fabric
• Heat transfer vinyl
• Ribbon
• Iron
• Silhouette

First, cut the fabric into circles.  We made ours by tracing a 6 inch flower pot.  

Next, cut Santa and the  reindeer onto the glitter heat transfer vinyl using a Silhouette.  Making sure the images will fit on a 6 inch circle of fabric of course.  A couple things to remember when using heat transfer vinyl.  Place the vinyl on the cutting mat SHINY SIDE DOWN.  Make sure to MIRROR your image (especially if it’s words.)  Remember how this was our first time using heat transfer vinyl?  Well, we are not sure if we did it exactly right. It worked out perfectly, our method just didn’t seem to match up to the tutorials we read through.  Still it worked so well that we figure it can’t really be the wrong way either.  So this is how we did it.

After we cut the vinyl we peeled off each piece:

Flipped the piece over so the glittery side was up, and placed it on the fabric circle:

Then we placed a piece of scrap fabric between the iron and the vinyl and pressed for about 20-30 seconds with NO STEAM.

Ta-da!  They ironed on as easy as cereal for dinner!  

To string them together, we snipped a couple spots along the top of each circle…..

and strung some ribbon through.  Very professional.  Totally easy and effective. 🙂

That’s it!  Ready to hang!  Seriously, this was a perfect first time heat transfer vinyl project-it went so smoothly and turned out so beautiful!  We totally love it.  

So while this chapter is over, our love story is far from it.  We have ideas bursting from our brains for this stuff!  If you need some vinyl be sure to check out DialyCraftVinyl.com, they have it all!

(Daily Craft Vinyl provided us the vinyl for this project to help spread the word as they are a new company.)

Linking up to some of these parties: