Paper Leaf Wreath
Use your Cricut Joy to make a wreath of any size!
What You Will Need
- Green card stock one sheet
- Cricut Joy or any other Cricut machine
- Cricut Joy mat
- Hot glue and glue gun
- Wire wreath form
- Scissors or paper cutter
Instructions
- Cut the paper into strips that are 4 1/2 inches wide and that will fit onto the mat. I used two pieces and cut 30 leaves. The Joy itself can cut small items obviously so we had to trim our 12 by 12 paper because the maximum size on a mat is 4 1/2 by 12. Now, the Joy can cut mat-less as well. Things like vinyl and iron-on can be cut out of long rolls. You can cut up to 4 1/2 feet of a single design or 20 feet of a repeating design. So you can definitely get long projects out of a very small machine. However, if you're going to cut paper, you're limited to the 4 1/2 by 12.
- The fine point blade is the only blade that comes with the Cricut Joy, so it is for thinner materials. Things like paper, iron-on, vinyl, that type of thing, but these materials are super common when you're making projects so the Joy might be the only machine you need. The Joy actually doesn't have any buttons and you use the app for all of your functions. Just set the material type and then, once this light is flashing, load your material. The great thing about Joy is you just start sticking the material into the machine and it pulls it in for you. The other great thing is it measures the material for you so you don't have to worry if you don't have enough or not. And then, when it's done with all that, right in the app it asks you to press go to start. I cut two sheets of these leaves for the 8-inch wreath that I made. You can cut more or fewer depending on the size you are making and how full you want it to be.
- Once the cut is complete, it'll prompt you to unload right in the app or try again where you can cut over the same area again. Then each of thee leaves need to be removed from the mat.
- I like to remove all of the scrap areas first and discard them.
- Then you can flip the entire thing over and bend the mat back to remove the leaves. These are pretty delicate and you don't want to rip them as you take them off.
- Then you want to take each leaf and sort of bend them up towards the center. This just creates more of a 3D effect when they're actually on the wreath. Just slightly bend the leaves up on both sides.
- Then take a hot glue gun and just glue each of the leaves into place. Use a tiny dot of glue for each to connect it to the wire and you want it to slightly hang off. You can fill as little or as much of this wreath up as you want.
- So there is our finished wreath all with Cricut Joy. So that was our first project all with the Cricut Joy. So you could make this wreath in any size you wanted to, right? So just because the Cricut Joy is small doesn't mean you have to make small projects with it. So it cuts simple materials, think of it that way. Simple machine, simple materials. Super simple machine, super simple design, one blade, you just like put the material in and it feeds it in for you, very intuitive, Cricut Design Space walks you through everything, but even though that mat is super small, we can make big projects with it, right? So we can divide things up, make tons of these leaves, make a full wreath as big as we want to. We could make vinyl that I talked about, up to 4 1/2 feet for a single design or 20 feet repeating, so huge signs you could make with the small, simple, Cricut Joy.