Cute Pony Vest with the Cricut Explore and Iron-on-Vinyl!

Hello everyone!

We had a lovely half-term holiday last week, including spending a few days in Bath catching up with some friends. But before that me and Little Miss had some fun decorating a vest top for her to wear:

My daughter (aged 6) was very involved with the process from start to finish! She’s been getting quite interested in designing clothes lately, and now she knows what Mummy’s machine can do there will be no stopping her!

We began by talking about the design. She wanted lots of animals around a heart. I pointed out that this would mean the animals would be quite small to fit on the vest top (which we’d bought at Matalan), so she decided to just have one big animal, maybe a horse or a pony. So we tried out a couple of images in the Design Space, it took her a while to decide between the larger horse or the foal, which she insists is a pony:

Eventually she decided she liked the ‘pony’ (Foal image #M37E48), and she also decided she liked the smaller heart instead of the one with wings, because then it could go on his flank and be like a ‘cutie mark’ which the My Little Ponies have!

I helped her match the colours to the iron-on-vinyls I had, then I let her resize things and place them where she wanted in the design space, I just had to help a bit with the text. She wanted it to say ‘I’m lonely’ but I said that sounded a bit sad, why is the pony lonely? She said ‘he wants to make new friends’. So we changed it to ‘be my friend?’ using the ‘Cuttin Up – Serifs’ font:

We could have made the vest in the Design Space a lighter colour to match her vest, but she found it easier to see the shapes on a darker background.

Once we had it all planned out I told her to click ‘go’ and showed her how to stick the vinyl onto the mat (remembering to select ‘Mirror Image for Iron-On’ in the Design Space). At this point I realised it wanted to cut a whole pony in black just to have a black eye – it would be a black base layer, with the eye as a cut out hole in the teal top layer. I didn’t want to waste my black vinyl, so I went back and hid that layer, then added a little oval for an eye to go on top instead!

When it was ready to go Little Miss was allowed to press the buttons and turn the dial, under supervision of course:

I helped her peel the waste vinyl off slowly, she was really concentrating:

Then it was time to iron it on! We placed some greaseproof paper over the design whilst ironing. I helped my daughter arrange the shapes on the vest, but she ironed it – you have to iron each layer individually:

Remember to make sure the iron has steam turned off! I usually just use a medium heat setting.

Now, at this point it should have been finished, but I realised I didn’t like something about the design – the pony ended up with his mane over both ears instead of just the back ear:

I decided to cut another ear to go on top. I cut the pony’s head from the same iron-on vinyl – I just used enough vinyl for the head but covered the rest of my mat with scrap paper so the blade wasn’t wrecking my mat (while it cut the rest of the pony out):

Then I used my Cricut scissors to cut out just the ear:

And ironed it on top of the mane:

All done:

The vinyls we used were Black and Teal Cricut Iron-On Lite, and Pink Cricut Glitter Iron-On.

It certainly made someone happy:

She wore it on the train on the way to Bath and showed it off to anyone who’d listen!

She has pointed out some more clothes she can add things too, and told me I need to decorate some of my own too, so I think my machine will be getting a good workout! If you’ve been on the lookout for an Explore, they are now available HERE at Amazon.co.uk, Create & Craft TV have it back in stock HERE, and you can pre-order it HERE at Hobbycraft – who are including a free tool kit.

Don’t forget my blog event is approaching this weekend, all the details are HERE, and the ‘Guess the Project’ contest will start soon in the Facebook Group HERE!

Bye for now, Jennifer x

DISCLOSURE: Cricut have provided me with a Cricut Explore Machine, some materials including iron-on-vinyl, and access to the Image Library, to help me write this post. However ALL opinions in this post are my own and not governed or controlled by Cricut in any way.