Vinyl is a great crafting material that you can use to cut out silhouettes to put on all sorts of different things. You can make great wooden signs, put designs on mirrors or glass, make candle holders or even add designs to bracelets. The possibilities are endless really, but a lot of people are put off using vinyl when they’re crafting because it can be quite a tricky material to work with. But if you know what you’re doing, you can make so many great things with it. If you want to start crafting with vinyl but you’re a bit unsure about it, here are a few tips to help you get started.

Get A Good Quality Cutter

If you don’t have the right equipment, you’re really going to struggle to make good designs with your vinyl. You can draw out your designs and cut them by hand but it’s a very tricky job and you’re not likely to get a very neat design and it won’t look very professional. You’re much better off investing a bit of money in a vinyl cutter instead. There is quite a big range of vinyl cutters, some that just cut sheets and others that will actually cut a design out for you. Check out www.vinylcuttingmachineguide.com for more information on choosing the right one. You’re best off spending a bit more money on one that can trace the image and cut it out for you if you want professional looking vinyl designs.

Join Silhouette Groups On Social Media

When you’re first starting out, you need to get to grips with the basics of vinyl cutting before you can start coming up with your own designs. If you join silhouette groups on social media, you’ll get access to loads of great templates that people have put up and there are plenty of more experienced people that will be able to give you tips to help you along the way.

Don’t Make Letters Too Thin

Whenever you’re doing a design with letters on, you’ve got to be careful. Vinyl is quite fiddly to work with and when you apply it to a surface, you need to make sure that it’s going on perfectly flat. That’s so difficult to do if you’ve got very thin letters. When you’re well practiced, you might be able to manage it but when you’re a beginner, try to make the letters a little thicker where possible, you’ll find it so much easier to apply.

Always Buy More Vinyl Than You Need

If you follow the rest of these tips, you should be able to avoid mistakes for the most part. However, working with vinyl is a steep learning curve and you’re going to have a few mishaps along the way. If you only buy one sheet of vinyl and it goes wrong, you’ll be stuck halfway through a project before you can get hold of some more, so always buy more than you expect to need to account for any mistakes.

Now that you’ve got your vinyl cutter and you know the basics, head over to www.lifeasmama.com for a list of great beginner projects to try.