13 Days of Cricut Halloween – Jack O’ Lanterns

Pumpkins aren’t as prevalent here in the UK as in other parts of the world – I’m looking at you America. And I don’t really like them anyway. But I had an ingenious idea to make some little Jack O’ Lanterns, and not have massive rotting squashes in my house for weeks. And it involved using the Cricut too!

The first step was finding Jack O Lantern faces. It wasn’t difficult. I got several bajillion from CraftStarters.

What was difficult was narrowing down which faces to use. It was tough, but I eventually picked eight. Then I cut them simply and easily out of vinyl.

Now, what was I going to put my faces on?

Oranges! Well. I’m not exactly sure what these are. They’re sold as “easy peelers”. I tend to lump satsumas/clementines/tangerines into the same group. They’re all oranges.

I started off using transfer tape, but the vinyl wouldn’t stick to the orange peel and I ended up having to peel them off the transfer tape. They were simple enough shapes that it was easy to just peel them like stickers from the backing paper and position them onto the oranges.

I did accidentally put one face on upside down, but who cares.

I spent a good twenty minutes trying to get them to stack. Eventually getting a badly framed shot because my finger is holding that top orange in place.

Then I lined them up instead.

Yes, there are six oranges and I’d originally picked eight faces. I like oranges too much and I ate some before I started.

After that I peeled all the stickers off, put it back on the backing paper, and ate the oranges.

Mwah, ha ha!!!!

I didn’t wanna just chuck the vinyl faces though. So I searched Cricut Access for pumpkins and cut out eight pumpkin shapes from cardstock.

These turned out really cute. I might make them into ATCs next year.

But wait! There’s more!

That’s right, this blog has a bonus project!

While scrolling Facebook I came across this.

It’s a brilliant idea. Trick or Treating isn’t as common in the UK as it is in the USA. It does happen, although not much in my area. But this was a very cool and cute idea, and a good excuse to use the Cricut to make a pumpkin decal.

I used this SVG from Printable Cuttable Creatables.

I removed the shadow from the bottom, since I didn’t want that bit. And since I didn’t have two shades of orange, I cut the outline from black – fiddling with the stalk a little.

I wanted to stick this to the window, so I needed the sticky on the top of the image. I sat and stared at the pieces for ages trying to figure out how to do that, and eventually decided I couldn’t be bothered.

I was just going to layer it, and then stick it to the window with transfer tape.

Putting it together was awkard – with the stretchy outlines of the pumpkin, and the entire time I was doing it something felt wrong.

Once I’d finished I realised what was wrong. You don’t generally add the outline on top when layering vinyl. You cut seperate pieces and leave the black from the base layer to create the outline.

So I went back to Design Space, played with the contours and re-cut.