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Express your love for wine this Valentine’s Day with this cute Wine Is My Valentine SVG file for Cricut or Silhouette cutting machines. Make DIY Valentine wine glasses and drink your love juice in style!
It’s free file Friday!
This week’s file has an easy project to go with it. I’m sure you’ve heard this a LOT over the last year or so, but Valentine’s Day probably won’t feel the same this year. But that doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate in style!
Is it just me or is wine something you’ve gravitated towards as you’ve gotten older? In the bygone days of my misspent youth, I was all about the mixed drinks. The ones that made you feel like total crap the next day. But now that I’m older and so much wiser (ha!), I find that a nice glass of wine does the trick.
In honor of the season and of my love for wine, I created a design for a Valentine’s wine glass. Creating custom wine glasses is so easy with your Cricut and some permanent vinyl. This is a project you can knock out in no time at all. But there are a few tricks to making it last.
Materials Needed for Valentine’s Wine Glass
- Cricut Maker, Explore, or Joy (or another type of machine that can cut vinyl designs)
- Wine glass – I’m using a stemless wine glass found at, where else, the Dollar Tree!
- Rubbing alcohol
- Permanent vinyl – I’m using Siser Easy PSV Permanent Vinyl from Happy Crafters
- Transfer tape
- Design or SVG file
Wipe Surface of Glass with Alcohol
Before you apply the vinyl to a glass surface, it’s best practice to wipe the surface using rubbing alcohol. This will remove any oil, dirt, or debris from the glass and help the vinyl adhere to the surface better.
I picked up this handy little dispenser from the Dollar Tree for rubbing alcohol. I think it’s supposed to be for nail polish remover but it works great for rubbing alcohol too! You take a cotton ball or paper towel and depress the button in the center and the rubbing alcohol will dispense.
SVG File
This file will be free until February 12. While it’s in the free period, you can just hit the Download Now button below to immediately download the zip file. After that, you can still purchase in our shop.
I include several different file formats for each design so you can use it in a variety of projects! You’ll need to unzip the file first since you can’t upload a zip file to Design Space. Just unzip it to your computer and upload the SVG file to Design Space.
Upload Your File to Design Space
I wrote a post about uploading SVG’s to Design Space that you can read if you need a little help on getting the file ready to cut.
For this design, there are a few things I recommend you do before you cut the design.
First, you’ll want to Ungroup the entire design so that you can do the remaining steps.
In Design Space, make sure everything on the canvas is selected and then hit Ungroup in the Layers Panel on the right.
The next thing I would recommend is to attach all the elements by color. Attaching them means they cut together in the same position as they are in the design. This will make things a little easier when you add your design to the wine glass since they’re already positioned correctly.
If you don’t attach them, Design Space will try to minimize the amount of material that’s used and will move them to the top of the mat with as little space between them as possible. Then you’ll have to place each element separately which can be a pain. This is a small design so I’m not that concerned about wasting material. If this was a much larger design, I wouldn’t use this method because of the amount of material that would be wasted.
To attach elements together by color, select the first one in the layers panel, and hold the control key or (command on a Mac) and click the other elements that have the same color. Once all the elements have been select, hit Attach at the bottom of the layers pane. Repeat this step for the remaining colors until they’re all attached by color group.
The last thing you’ll want to do is make sure the design is correctly sized for your wine glass. My glass was a little over 3 inches tall so I sized the design to 3 inches by a little over 2.5 inches. Make sure the padlock is closed so it sizes proportionally.
Prepare Your Mat and Cut the Design
Once you’ve resized and attached everything by color, you’re ready to cut the design.
Since there are 4 separate colors in this design, I’m going to use my favorite trick to cut everything on one mat. Go to the second mat, select it and hit the 3 dots in the upper left corner. Then select Move Object:
This screen will pop up asking you which mat to move it to. I’m going to move everything to the white mat.
Once you select a mat, the element will move to that mat and be placed in the upper left corner by default. Move the element to one of the corners of the mat.
Repeat this for the remaining elements until everything is on the same mat.
Cut your vinyl and place it in each of the corners of the cutting mat. A dirty mat in my case…yuck. See how I cleaned these bad boys up in my post about cleaning Cricut cutting mats!
Weed Your Design and Add Design to Transfer Tape
Once your machine is done cutting, weed the excess vinyl from each of the design elements. For this design, I decided to get all of the separate elements on the transfer tape and attach it to the wine glass at once. I started with the black text. I cut my transfer tape so it would fit the entire design and then put it on top of the text. Using the scraper tool, I went over the tape until it adhered to the tape.
Next, I placed the transfer tape over the next set of elements and repeated. I could have scooched it over a little more to the right so it was more centered with the black text but it still looks fine.
Repeat this for each part until the complete design is on the transfer tape.
Attach the Design to the Wine Glass
Working with vinyl on rounded surfaces like a cup or glass can be a little tricky because the transfer tape tends to wrinkle and not lay flat which in turn can cause your vinyl to wrinkle too. The approach I took was to start on the left side of the design and attach that first. I lined up my transfer tape on the glass where I wanted the design to go but only used the scraper on the left side of the design leaving the rest of it free from the glass. Once the vinyl was on the glass, I peeled back the transfer tape from that side and then moved across. I only used the scraper tool to attach about a third of the design at a time.
I realize this is hard to visualize with pictures so I’ll probably be doing a video for this soon!
Is This Dishwasher Safe?
Certain types of permanent vinyl hold up better in the dishwasher than others. I’ve been using Siser Easy PSV for a while and haven’t had any issues. But really, no vinyl is going to last forever. If you really want your vinyl to last for the long haul, you can use Mod Podge Dishwasher Safe Waterbase Sealer.
In the interest of transparency, I have to say that while it will protect the vinyl for a long time, there are some definite drawbacks to using this product.
First of all, it has a curing time of 28 days. That’s a long time to wait until you can put it in the dishwasher.
Second, it’s non-toxic but not food safe so when you apply it, don’t put it near the mouth of the glass where someone might touch it when drinking.
And my last issue is that it’s really hard to apply it without visible brush strokes. Following up with a thin layer of water seems to help but it doesn’t entirely fix the problem.
I hope you enjoy this free file and make something awesome with it!
Happy Crafting!
Sharon
