Let's Make Your Own Vinyl Wall Decals

This is a quick how-to on making a vinyl wall decal easily and cheaply for your office using existing artwork and a Cricut Explore.

Step 1: Setting Up Your Cutting Board.

First things first bringing in your artwork to Cricut's Design Space. To keep things simple you would want your logo/motto/message/quote in high resolution vector art. Since we're dealing with a board only 12-inches wide, you might have to slice the image and save as individual pieces for it to be at the size you need. This can be as crazy as you like (i.e, one letter per cutting board, for instance) or try to maximize cutting time/space and group things together on the same board.

Scale is important to keep in mind.

Step 2: Cutting.

If you own one of these you'll quickly learn the ins and outs of setting up a vinyl mat, etc. It's definitely a learning experience....

Step 3: Removing the Negative Transfer

Here's wheres things start to get real fun.

Removing the vinyl carefully is key. Unfortunately, the Cricut vinyl cuts aren't as sophisticated of some of the professional produced double-sided laminates (blik, for instance) where you can just paste on wall and then remove the backing and wa-la!

That said, the machine does come with a really useful tool, that let's you peel off even the most detailed, thin slices of vinyl carefully.

Step 4:

Last step is to get it up on your wall.

If I were to do this again, would have added a piece of painter's tape as a level and used it as a straight-edge guide. Regardless, if you have a steady hand, take your time you can get it on nicely and [mostly] straight.

Now sit back and enjoy the awesomeness.