Project Four - Glass Etching

MY CRICUT IS HERE!!!!  I was like a kid on Christmas morning opening it up.  So..it's time for the first Cricut project.  This project is entirely stolen from a girl and a glue gun http://kimboscrafts.blogspot.com/2011/01/etching.html.  I would pretend to be ashamed..but who are we kidding?  I LOVED her idea (and her entire blog for that matter..trust me, you'll find many more projects that I've...uh...borrowed from her site.  I'll always give her credit though because that girl can craft!).

Anyway, here's how mine turned out...

Basically, you  just get yourself some vinyl at JoAnn's or Michaels and Hobby Lobby or pretty much any craft store.  Then you make yourself some stencils.  I used my Cricut but you could also make your own stencils with an xacto.  The hardest, hands down hardest, part about this project was figuring out how to get my lettering all backwards.  I'm no Cricut expert, being that it's brand new, so that took a lot of trial and error.  Basically, I typed in all of my words backwards but since I wanted two lines, I would basically type the words for the first line in backwards (aka for this is NOT I typed in "TON si siht) then hit the return button and do the same thing for your second line.  Then you have to go in and make all of the letters print out in reverse.  I learned that it seemed to just reverse each individual character, and not the phrase as a whole, hence the reason to type the letters in reverse order.

Then I cut my vinyl, slapped it on the bottom of my pyrex, and used my Armor Etch (I found this at Hobby Lobby but not at JoAnns, I'm not sure if Michaels has it).



Then follow the directions and apply a nice thick coat over your stencil (you can see mine up there in the background).  The one word of advice...the directions say to let it sit for 5 minutes but that really didn't seem to do much for me so I let mine sit more like 30 or 45 minutes and then washed it off really well and peeled my stencil off.  Oh, and make sure to be careful with this stuff...keep away from eyes, don't use with kids, etc.

I love how my pyrex dishes came out and I can't wait to personalize some more.  I also feel like these would make great gifts!