Decorating a backpack with my Cricut

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.

This year, I am doing a lot of experimenting with my Cricut Maker, personalising, making and decorating items. I received a new Cricut Maker a couple of months ago, and I’ve already posted two blog posts if you’d like to know a little bit more about what I’ve been up to, then here are the links :

Cricut Maker – 7 Things I made right out the box.

Cricut Easy Press – A review and my first makes.

Today I wanted to do a step by step guide of using my Cricut Maker and Easy Press to personalise a backpack to take travelling.

Just to recap all you need is :

A backpack – this one is made of 100% recycled polyester
A small amount of Cricut iron-on
Easy Press Machine.
Cricut Machine (I have the Maker)

Here is my Cricut Maker in all of its shiny glory.

Ok, so first sign into Design Space App on either your iPad/phone (Bluetooth) or Laptop. I use both. Then search for the design you want to use. I wanted a travel theme so searched for travel and it came up with lots of quotes and images.

I choose ‘Born to travel’ with the plane, as I thought the font looked like the trails of smoke that planes leave in the sky. It reminded me of my trips to America with the girls and we would watch them paint I heart Jesus with the contrails. Or when we are home and see them, and we guess what exotic place the plane was going to.

So I selected this and added it to my canvas. I also ungrouped them, as I wanted to use different colours, so I could see what my final design would look like.

As you can see I changed the canvas and the wording to a very similar colour to my backpack. I also changed the plane to gold, which was the colour I was going for.

Now I realise this isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I wanted the wording on the backpack to be subtle. So as the glitter iron-on caught the light you could see it. I luckily had glitter iron on from Cricut that was a very near match to my backpack, so I thought the look would be more unusual.

This design was in two colours, so I just then needed to load up the Maker twice with the iron-on.

As you send the design to make there are a couple of things you do need to remember.

Choose the type of iron-on (some people call this HTV heat transfer vinyl)
Remember to mirror the image.

Weeding iron-on is really simple.

You can see that it comes on this quite thick backing. This is what you are ironing on using the Easy Press. Depending on what I’m ironing, I sometimes use a cotton protective sheet too, between the design and the press. Use the heat setting guide on the Cricut site for more details.

Another tip that I find helps me, especially if I need to layer, is to place everything onto your backpack either using your eye or a tape measure and mark it. Once you are happy with the placement you are good to go.

So here A, my youngest with her new backpack.