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These dollar store Christmas candles will be a great addition to your holiday decor this year. And it’s easy peasy to do with your Cricut!
A new Dollar Tree store just opened up very near to where I live recently. This could mean big trouble for me because I LOVE going to the Dollar Tree for craft supplies. I waited a whole week after they opened before I went. I think that shows an incredible amount of restraint on my part, don’t you? 🙂
Lucky for me (maybe), they already had all their Christmas stuff out. These jar candles caught my eye right away.
I thought these candles would look so cute with a festive design on the side. I’ve been doing a lot of projects lately with my Cricut Explore Air 2 in my new and improved craft room. And I’m always looking for any excuse to get in there and make something. So…let’s make some Christmas candles!
This project will work with any type of glass jar candle really. This tutorial is based on the 8″ jar candles from Dollar Tree.
Dollar Store Christmas Candles
Materials Needed For This Project
- Jar candles. I chose one each of the 8″ jar candles from Dollar Tree in red, white, and green
- Vinyl sheets in the color of your choice. I went with white
- Cricut Cutting Machine
- Access to Cricut Design Space
Create and Cut Your Vinyl Design
Fire up Design Space and get creative! There were 3 candles so I thought “JOY” would be a good choice. I knew I was going to include snowflakes in my design so I wanted a simple font for the letters. I just went with the Cricut Sans font that’s available in Design Space.
The candles I bought were 2″ in diameter so I sized my letters to be 2″ wide and about 2.5″ tall so the entire letter would be visible on the front. If you don’t have the same size candles, measure the diameter of your container and then size your letter and design based on that.
If you’re making a set as I did, you’ll want the letters to be all the same size. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to type the entire word, in my case “JOY”, and then ungroup it. Your letters will be separated so you can add your other design elements, but the letters will be the same height and width.
Next up is to add some festive design elements. For some reason, I’ve been using a lot of snowflakes lately. Maybe it’s all the early snow we’ve had here in Illinois this year!
Once you’ve imported or selected the other items for your design, place them around each letter. I used the same snowflake graphic and resized it a few times for variety.
Next, select the design for each candle (letter and snowflakes) and attach them so they cut together. Your letter and any other images you want on each candle should show attached together. Your canvas should look something like this:
And that’s it! Now you can hit Make It and send your design to your Cricut machine.
Because we’re going to be placing this design on a candle, there’s no need to mirror it or anything. Place the vinyl on a cutting mat right side up and load it into your machine. Make sure your material is set to vinyl and hit the Go button.
Remove and Weed the Vinyl
Once it’s done the cutting, carefully remove the excess vinyl and use the weeding tool to remove any little bits if necessary. Cut your letters apart so you’re left with 3 separate pieces.
Place Your Vinyl
Cut a piece of transfer tape that’s roughly the same size as your design. It doesn’t have to be exact but make sure that it at least covers everything you’ll need to place on the candle.
A word of warning – I grabbed Strong Grip transfer tape by accident and it was way too sticky for this project. It worked but it took some extra work to remove the transfer tape from the design. Learn from my mistake and use the standard grip tape instead. 🙂
Place the “Standard Grip Transfer Tape” 🙂 over the design and use the scraper tool to adhere it to the transfer tape completely. Lift the tape from the vinyl backing and your design should now be on the transfer tape. Like magic. Or tape. Whatever.
Now you just need to place your design on the candle and use the scraper tool to adhere the design to the glass. Slowly lift the transfer tape from the candle. If there are spots where the design is coming up with the tape, use the scraper tool again to try to get it to stick to the glass.
Repeat this process for the remaining two candles, trying to position the letters in the same spot on each candle so they’re aligned.
Not Bad for a Dollar, Huh?
See how easy it is to transform a plain candle into a cute Christmas candle? And it only costs a dollar!
It doesn’t take a lot of money to create something festive and unique. You just need a little creative thinking…and a dollar!
Free Template
If you like the design I created for my candles and would like to use it, I’ve created a free SVG file for you to download and import into Design Space. I created the file so you can swap out any elements, change the font, move stuff around, etc.
When you first load it into your project, you’ll need to first resize it to fit your candles (for mine the right size was 10.5 x 5.5), and then Ungroup it a few times – once for the overall design, and then each of the letter groupings. You can now freely move around any of the elements, delete them, insert new ones, change the font, etc.
Once you’re done, you just need to attach them the same way as above – select your letter and any elements that go on each candle and then attach them so they cut together.
Of course, if you like the design the way I have it you just need to Ungroup the main design and then attach the letter and elements before you cut.
I hope that’s not too confusing! If you run into issues, shoot me an email at sharon@sharonandalex.com and I’ll try to help out!
Get the free file by clicking the image below to download.
