I don’t know about you, but I’ve been so excited for decorating my classroom for this upcoming year! I chose to do a travel theme in the room, so everything has to do with airplanes, passports, and maps! I love to travel, so it was easily something I could get excited about.
When I started teaching (in my pre-cricut days), I would buy the die-cut letters and usually spend a ton of money trying to gather all of the letters I needed for my room. And then – Cricut happened. I’m not going to lie, up until last November, I had no clue what a Cricut even was until my amazing co-teacher introduced me to this amazing crafting essential.
Let me tell you, this thing is amazing! I’m a big fan of creating custom birthday cards, t-shirts, and totes! But that is not why I am writing today. I had an epiphany that if I could do all of this with my Cricut, why not use it for work too? Okay, maybe it was more of a Pin than an epiphany that inspired me, LOL! Without further ado, here are the three ways I created my bulletin board letters in my classroom.
Way 1 – Cricut Print & Cut Option
I wanted to create bulletin board letters that went along with my theme – learning is a journey. A map background would be perfect to represent traveling, but I wasn’t sure how I would do it. I did some research, and the did you know that you can insert a picture as a pattern to the background of letters? It comes out so cool when it’s done! Here are the steps to create beautiful bulletin board letters using the print & cut option:
- Go to google and find a pattern you want the letters to have in them.
- In Cricut Design Space, go to Upload – Pattern Fill.
- You won’t see these in your images when you upload.
- Search and upload the pattern that you saved from Google (or created yourself, I’m just not that talented!)
- Add text and type what you want. Duplicate your text. Make sure one is bold and one is regular.
- For the regular text, click to make it a print and cut, and then change the print type to pattern. You can choose the pattern you uploaded, or you can choose from the patterns Cricut provides.
- Align your patterned text over the bold black text, this will give you a nice outline around your pattern to make the words easier to read. This is optional, you could just leave the text as the pattern if you prefer.
- When you go to print and cut the letters, make sure you flatten the two layers of text so that your Cricut only makes one cut of the letter and not two.
way 2 – Cricut Cut 2 Layers
The second Cricut way is a way that I prefer, solely because I don’t like wasting ink, is just cutting two layers of letters. I follow the same steps as above, except I don’t choose Print and Cut. I create two layers of the text, I line up the letters to make sure they fit and look nice, and then the Cricut cuts the two different colors of card stock. I usually do black in the back and a color in the front. I use a glue stick to line up the letters, and then laminate them.
Way 3 – Print and Cut from PowerPoint
Okay, so a Cricut is quite an expense for a teacher salary, so here is an alternative to using the Cricut to make beautiful letters for your bulletin board. For this way, you’re going to want to use PowerPoint to create your letters.
- The first thing you’re going to want to do when you open PowerPoint is change your page size to letter because that’s what is going to print nicely. Go to File – Page Set Up – Click the dropdown menu and find Letter Size.
- Create a text box that is the whole size of the page and type what you want your bulletin board to say.
- Make the font big, I’m talking 300+! Depending on the size of your bulletin board, I like to keep bulletin board letters to about 3.5-4.5 inches. Letter size paper is 11 inches tall (if you have it in portrait mode), so I like to make my letters about half the size of the paper.
- You may have to duplicate your slide until you can fit all of the letters you want.
- When you have the letters you want and the size you want, you can duplicate the slides and make the letters slightly smaller than the main letters so that when you cut them you can layer them.
- Print your letters, cut them out & glue the layers together. I laminate my letters, so I don’t use too much glue, just enough to position the letters together for the laminating pouch.
To save your color ink with PowerPoint, find a font that has a nice outline, such as Clementine Sketch, Action Jackson, or KG PDX Blocks. I usually find my fonts from dafont.com or 1001fonts.com. If you have a nice font with a thick outline, you can just print black ink on colored card stock to save your color ink and you won’t have to cut and glue two layers!
I hope you find these strategies to create beautiful bulletin board letters helpful! Let me know if you have any questions!
alexandra
