DIY Door Vinyl

Well Hello There!  Good Morning Everyone! 

 

It is Friday morning, the sun is shining, and though it is a bit cold outside for May, I am already having a great morning so I wanted to say Hello to everyone before I begin my day.

 

When people come to my front door I want it to be welcoming, and I want it to be cute of course.  I saw the cutest picture of a red door with vinyl on the front of it and thought "I don't want to pay for that when I can do it myself".  I have a Cricut machine and I have some vinyl already so why not make it myself?  I never even thought of using vinyl word art on the front door, but what a super cute idea!  I don't have a red door and I sure don't want to paint it, but I thought that white vinyl on my brown door would be okay and so that is what I did. 

 

Every time I am in the front yard and I see my front door it makes me smile and I hope that each person that comes to my front door does too.  Yet again, another simple DIY project for my home that makes such a big impact by inviting people to come to my door.

 

It doesn't matter if your door is painted or what it is made of.  Wood, metal, glass...any material will work for this project.  That is the beauty of vinyl!  This is such an easy project that I want to share how I did this so that anyone else with the right tools can do this too! 

DIY Door Vinyl

You will need:

• vinyl in whatever color you choose
• Cricut (or other similar machine)

Since I am using a Cricut to cut my vinyl I use the Cricut Craft Room software.  It is a free software that connects directly to your machine so that you can design your image on the computer and see what they look like and how they fit onto your paper before printing.  This is great for using different size letters and for saving paper by adjusting how your letters fit onto the paper before you start cutting.

 

You can also use the software to 'weld' your letters together to make them connect as one word rather than having each letter cut separately and then trying to put them together later.  Yikes!

 

I would have liked to have a different font, but this is the only cursive font that I have already and so I used it for this project.  I measured the surface of my door that I wanted to put this word on and then created my image.  This is what it looked like on my screen before I printed.  I created the word and then lined it up the best I could on the page so that I don't waste too much of the vinyl.  Hey, this stuff isn't cheap!

I then cut the correct size vinyl to fit my entire word without a lot of leftovers and placed it on the mat where I need it to print the image.

 You might have noticed that some of my letters have weird overlapping tails on them when I showed you my computer screen image.  Well, you are right...there is nothing that I can do about that on the screen because that is the way the font is designed.  But there is something that I can do about it now that I have my word cut out. 

 

When I was creating my image, I made sure to place my letters so that once I printed it out, I would be able to cut off the extra tails of the letters that I didn't want and still make it look like a 'normal' cursive written word. 

 

I peeled off the vinyl outside of the word so that I could see the word itself better on the background and then cut the extra tails off.  This is what it ended up looking like after I took my scissors to it.  Much easier to do than it sounds I assure you!

For the final step...putting it on the door.  This part too is much easier than it seems, especially if you choose a short word like "Hello".  Before I did this, I made sure to clean the door really well AND made sure that is was dried completely so that I would have no issues with my vinyl sticking. 

 

I then started placing it on there and lining up one letter at a time, but not pressing down hard until I make sure that the entire word was where I wanted it.  I did have to unpeel it a few times to get it lined up correctly and make sure that no bubbles were present, but again, it was much easier than it sounds and since I didn't press hard, it didn't affect the stickiness of my vinyl AT ALL.

  

Once I had it placed exactly where I wanted it I went back and rubbed on it to make sure it was stuck on there good and with no wrinkles in the vinyl.



This was such a fun project and turned out to be much easier than I had imagined and that always makes me feel happy and accomplished!

Make sure you tell someone "Hello" today, just in case they don't come to your front door! 

 

Here is a picture of the one that was for sale on Etsy.  I love the red door here, but wasn't willing to paint mine.  And I like the period at the end.  Hehe  You could pick another word too, such as welcome...or even in another language!