I absolutely love making personalised gifts, and for me the Cricut machine is the best way to do this by far.
This year I’ve been experimenting with making gifts using things I have around the house or can find secondhand. I always stock up on notebooks when I see them on sale, and realised they would be a lovely gift if I could give them a personal touch. Enter the Cricut Foil Transfer kit! I’ve been meaning to give this a go for so long, and LOVE how they turned out.
You need:
- Cricut Maker 3 Machine
- Cricut Foil Transfer Kit
- Standard Grip Mat
- Notebooks
- Medium Weight Cardstock in assorted colours
- Glue and a paintbrush
Using the Foil Transfer Kit
Foiling on a Cricut is slightly different to how the machine cuts when you do other projects like using vinyl. The foiling tips are blunt and use pressure to secure the foil onto your base material, following the design you create in Design Space.
The Gold Foil Transfer Kit comes with three different line-weights, shown by the lines on the ends, small sheets of foil and tape for use to attach it to the base material.
Creating My Design
For this project I simply used the text function in the canvas, and wrote out the names of my friends who I plan to give the gifts to. I made sure to select foil in the operation section, and picked the right weight that I wanted the gold foil text to appear in.
How to make gold foil personalised notebooks
1
First I grabbed a few old notebooks I had collected - you can use simple exercise books for this or notebook fillers. I fifteen buy these on sale so it makes this a very affordable gift! If you feel the colour is too bright and might show through the yardstick, simple cover in some brown paper using modge podge first.
2
Start by selecting and setting up your design in the Design Space app. I then set up my card stock on the mat. Note that I chose cardstock that was the right size to fully cover the notebooks front and back. The next step was to secure the gold foil, right way up, to the cardstock using the tape provided. For this, it was important to work out where I wanted the gold lettering to show up in terms of how it would be attached to the notebook. That meant putting the lettering in the middle right hand side so the notebook could then be covered with the cardstock without having to cut it.
3
I placed the size of foil tip I wanted to use in the housing (you can choose either fine, medium or bold), and then put that into clamp B. Before finalising the Design Space steps, I made sure that on the canvas the design was going to align with where I had secured my gold foil to the cardstock. I then selected ‘make it
4
To cover the notebook in the lettered cardstock, I use a paintbrush to apply modge podge to the cover of the notebook and then pressed the cardstock on. I added some glue to the spine and the back of the notebook and then bent the cardstock around so that it fully covered the cover. Finally, I used scissors to trim the edges.
Voila!
To finish this little gift, I made some gift tags using the same method as above. I simply swapped out the foiling tool with a blade tool mid-way when the Design Space app told me to. And I have to say, I love this simple and magical gift!
In Australia, you can find the Cricut Maker 3 and Foil Transfer Kit at Spotlight or Harvey Norman.
This project is in collaboration with Cricut.
