Use Your CRICUT To Make A SUPER FUN, CUSTOMIZED Doormat!

hey friends Alicia here with makers going to learn and today we're going to be making a door mat from one of these core door mats everyone loves these and we've got a few tips and tricks up our sleeve that you all are going to love to learn about today make sure to click the Subscribe button and the little bell so you're notified every time we get crafty and let's get right into the video so the beauty in these projects is that it does not take a lot of supplies you can see here I've got our Flex still spray paint these are liquid rubber sealant coating meaning that they're waterproof so we love to use the Flex Seal in order to paint our dra mats that way they last a lot longer and if you're wanting to do something beginner friendly this is your first mat I highly recommend just using a black Flex Seal to complete your project the spray paint is really nice you can also buy in like the smaller tins and use a stippling brush but the black flexal spray paint is our go-to so the main ingredient to create one of these beautiful Mates is our Flex SE spray this is basically liquid rubber in a can you've probably heard of this or seen it in your local loads or Home Depot typically we lean towards just the black Flex Seal mainly because the color payout is so much better than white or any of the other colors that they offer now the color selection is very limited when it comes to Flex Seal that's why we try to keep it simple and just go for a black finish and then you can always seal it with the Flex Sil clear now if you're creating a project where you're using multiple colors and you're using different kinds of paint I highly recommend that you grab some of this Flex Sil clear because this is going to make sure everything is completely waterproof and so you don't want to take all that time to create your mat and then not be able to use it because it gets destroyed the second it rains so this is really going to help seal in any of those nonwater resistant paints now let's talk about freezer paper so if you go on the internet and you're looking on tutorials for how to do these mattes you're going to run into a couple different ways so a lot of people like to use just a permanent vinyl to kind of attach it and they'll transfer it on using press and seal listen that works for some people we have tried that method many many many times the freezer paper is always the go-to the freezer paper you apply heat to it it adheres to the mat it comes up easily you don't have issues pulling transfer sheet off or anything like that it cuts well on the machine so there's lots of perks using this freezer paper and typically we buy 150 square foot at a time so this is like a pretty big roll I will say if you find some freezer paper at home and for some reason you're trying to adhere it to your mat and it's not sticking it can go bad so the freezer paper does have a shelf life if you find it's not sticking I highly recommend just purchasing a new roll so if you feel like like I don't need 150t of freezer paper don't buy a huge roll in case you plan to use it in the near future you're also going to need a heat Source the Cricut Mini easy press is our go-to because we can really get into the crevices of our design so love the Cricut Mini easy press and I'm going to link all this stuff below so you all can snag it if you want to get it today and you can go ahead and start creating your own map I've also got just a standard measuring tape I have a 24in light grip matte now you can create this Project without a 24in mat and I will show you in design space how to split your design up if that's something that you're wanting to do I'm also going to put a couple links in the description to some of our other doormat videos that you may be interested in such as if you're wanting to use multiple colors and things like that because today we're going to keep it simple and just use that black Flex Seal to get a really strong bold design and then obviously you're going to need one of these mates so this is just your standard 18 by3 core door mat this is what we typically buy I can get these at Walmart for five bucks Hobby Lobby has them but we only buy them when they're on sale you can also get them at Home Depot and I believe you can get them at Lowe's as well now that we've went over supplies let's go ahead and jump into design space and decide what we want to put on our doormat so we're going to be using two different fonts called Juliet and simplicity so I am on the maker going to learn website you can see right here this beautiful Juliet font it's going to be perfect for our Taylor Swift inspired door matat I'm just going to hit download it's going to pop into a zip folder we can open that and then double click that font type and hit install all right so the first thing that you're going to want to do once you get into design space is go ahead and open a basic shape we're going to use the square I'm going to unlock this shape and let's change it to the size of our core door mat so this is going to be 30 by 18 okay it looks very big here so let's zoom out I'm going to go ahead and change the color up here beside this operation dropdown menu to a light brown now that Brown's a little dark so you can select Advanced and then move it until you get the right color this step is not necessary adding the color you do want to have the square but you can keep it whatever color you want I just really like to see my design before I go to cut it out so this helps me get a good visual now I'm going to go to my text box over here on the left we're going to do some lyrics from the ever so famous Taylor Swift today so I know we probably got lots of Taylor Swift fans watching hopefully you all love this doormat as much as we do so let's go ahead and top out what we're wanting to put on our doormat now you can put whatever you want get crazy with it whatever fits your personality that's the fun part of these mats is making them custom to what you love okay so I haveen an chosen a font yet I just wanted to get what I want on my design already onto the canvas what I'm going to do next is ungroup these to lines so right now both lines of text are in the same text box let's go to Advanced and ungroup to lines this is going to give us two separate text boxes and now I can change the fonts if I want so I'm wanting to use two different fonts here I'm thinking we'll do a pretty script for this is our house and then something a little bit more clean cut for we make the rules okay so this is the design that we're going to go with now there are a couple things that I need to fix so the first thing that I'm noticing is over here in our layers panel we've got these red exclamation point warnings saying it's not supported by the maker because the image is too big so what I'm going to want to do is make sure that this is our house is under 23 and 1/2 in wide so let's select it and make it a little bit smaller but I want it to be as big as it'll let me so I'm going to actually manually adjust that to 23.5 and then it makes it about that size then you can go in and adjust this proportionally if you're wanting to do that I think this size is pretty cute now for some reason you don't have a 24in mat it's very simple to create this just using a 12-in mat so all you're going to need to do I'm just going to pull this down here I'm going to actually duplicate this and set it to the side just so I don't have to redo it again what I want to do is put our words on their own on multiple lines of text okay so now I'm just hitting enter to do that you can see these will almost fit on a 12in mat now this one is still a little bit too big and we can double check that that by getting a basic shape we're going to do 11.5 because if you're cutting on a 12x 12 mat you would think initially oh I need to make a 12in square well no because you can't cut a 12 in width and height on a Cricut mat not truly it's really 11 and 1/2 so I'm going to make 11 and 1/2 in square let's go up here to operation and we're going to select guide and you can see this is our house fits inside of there nicely and then you can see this one fits in here nicely so you're going to have to cut it on two separate mats which is totally fine so now that we've got it the way that we want it I can hide my brown Square now if you're just wanting to do this one pay attention to this whenever we go over to the mat if you're wanting to do it on 12in mats I'm going to keep these up here so you all can see how we do both of them when we go to the make it screen so before we go to make it I'm just going to change the colors of these so they don't try to go all into the same mat let's just make this gold just for the sake of it standing out and then I'm going to Center these horizontally and then I'm going to attach them so they stay exactly where they are next we're going to go to make it confirm and then you can see here this one went onto our 24in mat it takes up the entire thing and then this one down here we can actually change this to a 12 by 12 mat and lucky for us they both fit on there so that's really nice um we don't need to mirror it or anything like that we're just going to keep it as is and then we're going to select continue now while that's loading I'm going to go ahead and get my mat ready with my freezer paper so you're going to want to use a light grip matte that is relatively new still sticky um if it's a really dirty mat you're probably going to want to make sure to clean it I'm going to go ahead and trim this the length of the mat and you can see as I'm cutting it it's kind of hitting the light because there is this waxy film on the back and then this side is a little bit more matte so when they're beside each other you can really tell now this shiny side is the side that needs to go down so you're going to want to cut it on the more matte side so what I'm going to do is just turn this over and I'm going to line it up we're going to trim off all of that excess paper using a true control knife and I'm going to burnish this down really well to make sure it's very much not going to move you also want to avoid any bumps in the paper otherwise it will not cut properly so I'm just going to fold this over and then trim it up really good back in design space we are going to browse all materials so we're going to cut this on medium card stock today and then hit done and we're going to do default pressure just using the fine point blade and then we can go ahead and load this into our machine okay while that cuts out I'm just going to lay some paper out to protect um any part of the mat that I don't want paint on as well as protect our table you want to do this in a very well ventilated area because it is spray paint so it's airol and there are fumes so I'll have a piece at the top and a piece at the bottom and then our words we'll go right through the middle and if I need to cut other pieces to cover it we can and we can also tape it down that way it's definitely not going to get anything under where we've got paper laid down so I'm going to go ahead and turn my mini easy press on to the highest setting and once that turns green we can put our design onto our mat once you start removing the outer part of the stencil make sure to be very careful because that is the part that we need the letters that are ins side so this part we don't necessarily need but we do need the middle of the E so you want this big part and you want the centers of the letters the actual word we don't need okay I'm going to start by pulling off the bulk of this and then getting it onto my mat I'm going to leave all the centers to my letters on this mat that way I know where they go and I can iron them on individually so my design got a little bit butchered in some areas I would probably do medium card stock with less pressure but really you need to kind of test your machine out and make sure that you've got the cut settings right cuz it's going to vary from machine to machine now if you're using a maker series There's an actual freezer paper cut setting the explore series does not have that typically medium card stock works for me um but today I didn't have as much luck but listen we're going to make it work I've got an xacto knife or a true control knife whatever you want to call it here ready to kind of fix the places where it may not have cut as well so I'm just going to do that and I'm going to pull off the bulk of this first and leave the middles of my letters on my mat that way I can just snag them individually and apply them to my mat and that'll make a little bit more sense here in just a second okay so we're just going to set all this to the side and we will be pulling from that here shortly and then we're going to go ahead and put this onto our mat so you can trim off um the excess I like to leave a little bit around it just for the sake of preventing paint getting on my mat anywhere but I'm going to trim off all of this excess mainly because I want to try to line this up in the center of my mat before I go spray painting it this just gives me a better visualization of where I want to put it so the mat is 30 wide we're going to need to put it about at the 15 Mark so halfway through our design and you can always just take this and crease it right where the halfway mark is so I just fold it in half and crease it and then I'm going to line that crease mark up with the 15 and then if you want to get real specific you can come over here here to this 18in side and you would want that 9 in line going half all the way through here and you can even double check this side and make sure it's pretty straight I'm more of an eyeball or myself but just for the sake of showing you all how this would be done that is how I would do it and you can use painters tape to like mark off the central points if that helps you um but I'm going to go ahead and just start ironing this on you can also use painters tape to secure this down so it kind of stays in one spot while you're ironing it um it's not the best Tack but it will stay once heat is applied to it you just have to kind of take your time and work slowly and make sure you're getting all of the areas so I like to kind of let it sit on an area for about 10 seconds and then we can move on to the next area now I'm going to take some tweezers and just plug in the middles of those letters and then we're going to press those down as well and then I'm just going to iron the middles of those letters down the same way that we did before this also gives a little bit extra adhesion for the parts that we already had went over if you have a bigger press like a bigger easy press you could probably use that I just really like using this mini easy press cuz I can put pressure exactly where I want it and sometimes these paper flaps want to come up and I can just kind of adjust it so that's just personal preference but if you've got a bigger press feel free to use that so before we go in into spray painting I just want to make sure any Corners that are still sticking up I'm just going back over them to make sure they're down before we start spray painting cuz I don't want any of that paint to get up under the stencil and this will tack on it doesn't have a great adhesion but this is so much easier than trying to apply vinyl in my opinion feel free to try both ways this is what works best for us so I'm going to take that butcher's paper on the top and the bottom and I'm just going to tape it so it's not moving at all then I have some freezer paper left over I'm going to use for the edges okay so you can see everything is closed off that we are not wanting to get paint on and then we just can see where our letters will go make sure you shake your Flex still up really really well I would do it for at least a solid minute and then do a test spray on something that you're not going to be painting which I just did and then you're just going to pop that off and then we're going to get to painting so you can let that top layer soak in for just a minute and then you can go back in and do a second and even a third coat until you're satisfied and then once you've got it how you want it you can go ahead and remove the [Music] stencil and then I'm just taking some tweezers and pulling out the middle of these letters and this is the final product what do you all think the only thing else that you could do and this is only if you're using non Flex Seal paint is add a layer of that Flex Seal clear now we use flex SE black paint here so we were fine um but if for some reason your store is out of the black and you just use a regular black grab a flex so clear that way you can waterproof whatever paint that you have Underneath It All right we finished hopefully if you all were just completing this for the first time you enjoyed this craft it can be a little bit tedious but the payoff is so good I feel like it always turns out beautiful and they're totally customizable so you can make one for every holiday every season or whatever you would like make sure if you did not already subscribe you hit the little subscribe buttton in the Bell so you're notified every single time we post and that free trial link for anyone who's wanting to join our membership and get access to these beautiful fonts and cut files to use on your Cricut Machine we've got that link below for you all we would love to see you as a part of our community and we'll see in the next video bye guys