I thought I would be inspired to craft more once we were squared away after our move, but while I have done some crafts in the last year, most of them were "needs," not "wants." Lots of last-minute kids' costumes for special school days, several gifts, and a few household projects.
But not many quilts, because my quilting heart was broken with that long-ago computer crash. After losing almost all of my hard work (thank goodness for having uploaded at least a few of my finished patterns!), I lost a lot of my drive to design. The few things I did finish up I took some lackluster pictures of, then set them aside to deal with later. Later never happened.
The thing that has finally brought my craft room humming back to life is my new Cricut Explore Air! It is ten times the machine my Expression was, and I am still having fun learning new techniques. I picked up very quickly how to create SVG files, and we now have custom decals on almost every surface of the house. My Christmas box is filling up fast with personalized, hand-made items, which is always a big crafting goal for me.
As I am getting back in to my designing, crafting, and my business, I am finding that my new Erin Condren planner is a good fit for me in my weekly planning. But I caught the decorating bug, and my new Sunday ritual is to sit down and decorate next week's pages and plan out my week. When I looked at all the cute planner stickers that were available, I realized not many of them are made for us Cricut users, who are still limited to a 6" x 8.5" print and cut space. I can print out all the free 8.5" x 11" ones that are floating around, but then I have to cut the stickers by hand. As a lazy person who does not have the steadiest of hands, that was not going to work for me.
So instead, I learned how to make my own! I will be creating these probably twice a month at least, and I will share them here with you. This is my Labor Day set, featuring Rosie the Riveter, some major city skylines (including my beloved Seattle), and an industrial-colored background.
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| Free Labor Day stickers for your Erin Condren planner. |
These will work on any cutting machine that can import PNGs, but it is specifically sized for the Cricut. You can save and download the image above and import it to Design Space (or whatever program you use with your electronic cutter), or you can get the full-resolution PNG with transparent background here. When you import it to Design Space, you will need to use the Firefox browser and set the width to 8.5 inches. If you maintain the proportions, the height should be right around 6 inches.
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| Stickers, once cut and the excess background pulled off for ease of use. I usually trim them down with a paper trimmer and store them in my planner pocket. |
I decorated my Labor Day week a little early so I could show you how it all fits together.
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| My week, mostly decorated. |
I will always include a Giving Back sticker to keep track of the hours, items, or money I plan to donate and to whom, as well as a Hydration Tracker. These are both things that I am working on improving personally, so I really want to highlight those in my planner. I hope that you find them useful as well.
I am also loving how easy it is to make little custom stickers on the spot. For instance, we have game night every couple weeks with our neighbors. Since it's a regular occurrence and I don't need to worry about writing down the time or other information, a sticker is a perfect way to mark it quickly. Five minutes after you decide what kind of sticker you want, you can have it created and cut with the Explore.
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| Easily make your own stickers! Night of Gaming +1, to remind me of our biweekly game night. |
Have fun decorating your planner! As for my own immediate future, I will be releasing my tested Dune quilt on Craftsy this week, starting to redraft my Bob's Burgers and Archie quilt designs, and launching my BOW 12 Days of Christmas quilt-along. More long-term, I will be finishing up the rest of my Game of Thrones quilt, which I know some of you have been waiting for. I found a few numbering errors, so those patterns have to be redrafted before releasing them. I look forward to sharing all this hard work with you in the coming weeks!
