I finally got around to trying the Cricut Foil kit and I am impressed! I designed a few SVGs that are perfect for the Cricut Foil kit.
I have been meaning to give this kit a try for some time now. I just haven’t been in the mood to try anything new. But during this past holiday break, I had this flash of inspiration and decided to act on it while I had a few days off.
I’ll let you all in on a little secret, I’m actually a terrible artist. I have like no drawing skills. My handwriting has just gone down the drain ever since I started typing and any skill that involves a pen subsequently went downhill as well. The funny thing is people conflate crafting skills with artistic skills. The truth is you don’t actually need artistic skills to craft great things.
In any case, my lack of drawing skills normally doesn’t bother me except for just one corner of the crafting universe. That corner is the watercolors corner. I love watercolors but for most watercolor paintings, you need to start with some sort of drawing which is where I get stuck.
Somewhere between Christmas and New Years, it dawned on me I can use my foil kit to do the drawing for me! After I made this creation, I realized I could create a similar look with other tools and materials but it was really the Cricut Foil kit that started it all.
Materials for Cricut Foil Projects and Alternatives
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Cricut Foil Kit – You can get this one directly from Cricut or from Amazon. It’s actually a pretty good starter kit and includes everything you might need for the first few projects.
Cardstock – I primarily use Cricut Foil on cardstock. The foil press has a lot of force so I would use medium weight cardstock at minimum to prevent tearing. Here are some of my favorite brands:
- Assorted Starter Pack – Basic assorted colors, great starter pack, perfect weight for most papercraft projects
- Cricut Joy Insert Card Packs – You don’t have to use these with the Cricut Joy, they are nice material kids for cardmaking.
- Cardstock Warehouse Brand on Amazon – I love the quality of all the matte-colored cardstock with Cardstock Warehouse. It is my go-to brand for individual matte colors that I might need
- Poptone Assorted Variety Pack – This is the perfect peppy assortment of colors of heavy cardstock. It’s a heavy cardstock assortment with colors I actually use frequently for cardmaking.
- Seasonal Assorted Variety Pack – This is a slight variation on the Poptone assortment and has a quite few neutrals that complement almost any accent color.
- Stardream Metallics Line – For paper crafts, the Stardream line is the go-to for a metallic shimmer finish. It is the perfect sheen to make any project pop. The core is also colored is which hard to find for metallic paper.
Watercolor Paper – If you are also interested in doing a combined watercolor project, I would recommend using dedicated watercolor paper. Here is the exact kind I used.
Watercolor Pens – I love love love watercolor pens, they make any novice watercolor painter look like a pro.
Vinyl – I’ll show you a way to do this with vinyl later on in the tutorial if you’re not in to the foil press. I used the brushed metallic vinyl in this assorted set.
Templates – I have 6 designs for you to try with your Cricut Foil Kit that are free in my resource library.
Tutorial for Cricut Foil Projects
Step 1: Choose your foil design
A few pointers here. So the foil kit comes with 3 different tips ranging from thin to bold. I tried the thinner ones and wasn’t super impressed. I felt like I could make something similar with just the Circut glitter pens.
Check out some of my Cricut pen projects if you’re interested in more like this.
Given this, I decided I like the bold foil tip the most because otherwise, it’s not worth the fuss of setting up the foil paper etc.
In terms of the actual design, you can either use a single line design or an outlined design. The difference is similar to the different in all the Cricut Design Space “cutting” fonts versus its “writing” fonts. I ended up using the “outlined” version of the design because it created a better more enhanced foil line.
Regardless, you can think of the foil tool as something similar to a pen for the Cricut so when you’re picking designs, think of what design you would want the machine to “draw” with a foil pen.
Step 2: Assemble the foil paper
This step was not as straight forward as the instructions that came with kit made it seem.
The kit comes with dedicated tape. I thought this tape was just ok. It ripped my medium weight cardstock and then wasn’t sticky enough for my watercolor paper because it is slightly textured. I ended up reinforcing it with painters tape.
Make sure your take is actually touching the foil paper to get enough grip. I wasted a couple of sheets because it kept slipping out of place.
Step 3: Align your design then Make It
I recommend cutting after you’ve drawn the design in which case you need to think ahead to where you want the design relative to how the paper will be cut. Regardless if you do the cutting and foil all in one step or separately manually, you still need to think about the placement of design and foil coverage. You will need to remove the foil before cutting so just keep that in mind.
Step 4: Lift the foil carefully
I’ve had parts of it smudge slightly so take care when lift it from the cardstock.
Step 5: Optional watercolors
I highly recommend giving watercolors a try, especially with these watercolor pens. It’s so easy and so much fun. Here, I just colored a few lines and then diluted the colors with the water only pen.
If you’re interested in getting your Cricut pen to paint watercolors, I have a separate tutorial on how to use the Cricut pen adapter to do this.
Alternatively to Cricut Foil
Ok, I’ll be honest, the Happy Birthday card was made with vinyl, not foil. I wanted to give both of them a try. I actually prefer the foil for watercolors because it looks more like a natural hand-drawn line.
The purple flower below is foil print:
However, the metallic vinyl also has a nice look to it as well.
I have a more detailed tutorial on how to make these “gilded” drawing designs with vinyl. The short version is you just cut the same design outline using metallic foil and then transfer it onto your card with transfer paper.
What do you think? Not too bad for a first time with the new kit right?
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Trying to get some more details about your project. You started with a thank you on cardstock. Then the next step was the flowers. Was the flowers done on watercolor paper? Can you use the watercolor pens on cardstock?
Yes, on watercolor paper. Watercolor on cardstock doesn’t work that well. The paper technically holds up but the paint doesn’t spread and blend as well.