Babycakes

Not so long ago a young woman at our church was expecting a baby.  There was going to be a baby shower for which I wanted to provide a gift.  I have come to love the darling "onesies" that so many little babies sport these days. 

Because I have the use of a Cricut Expression machine and because I heard it was possible to cut fabric designs with this machine, I decided to give it a try. I found a very pink baby onesie, washed it in good shape, then went to work on a design.

A cupcake was one of the designs on the Wild Card cartridge so I cut out several different sized cupcakes from paper to see how they would look on the onesie.  I settled on a 2-inch cupcake.

The next thing was to try to cut out fabric.  In order to cut out fabric, the fabric needs to be very stiff.  To accomplish this feat, I made several false starts, i.e. failures.  Finally I came up with a system that worked.

Wash a piece of 100% cotton fabric and iron it smooth. Spray starch on the front of the fabric and iron it on.  Repeat two more times.  Next apply Steam a Seam2 or Ultra Bond and Hold to the wrong side of the fabric to be cut.  Leave the backing paper on the fabric and apply the fabric/Steam a Seam piece to the Cricut cutting mat and press down very well so there is contact with every bit of the paper backing.  Increase the pressure on the Cricut to max and the cutting depth to 5 or 6. Set the speed of the cut to about 3.  Cut the starched fabric/glue/paper sandwich.

Remove from the cutting mat then remove the backing paper from the fabric.  Place the design (cupcake) onto the onesie and iron on according to the directions on the Steam a Seam package.

You now have a cute little decorated onesie. 

Since I liked  the idea of "babycakes", I used Cricut Craft Room software to make the Babycakes label.  Fun.