Cutting Fabric with the Cricut - Part 2

Ok. In my last post I mentioned that I was going to try to make a Quiet Book for my niece for her birthday. Well, you can go ahead and scratch that idea off the board. I have pretty much ruined a 12" x 24" cutting mat for my Cricut Expression because of mishaps with attempting to cut fabric with the darned thing. Don't get me wrong, I love my cricut. Not to mention the mistakes were entirely MY fault. Nothing to do with silly technology that can never seem to get anything right. No. The reason I am not doing the quiet book (for now anyway) is because I dislike applique so much! Something about going around small pieces of fabric on a slightly larger piece of fabric is so tedious and time consuming. I do not have the patience for it. I prefer the slightly larger projects. Who needs that bit of personalized embellishment? Ok... so it adds something.... But still... I guess I will continue on with how I have managed to ruin a bran-spakin-new 12" x 24" cutting mat... It all started with my great idea of cutting fabric...

I got the materials. Everything that I needed, and was suggested, to be successful in cutting fabric with the cricut. I had the Heat-n-Bond. I even used it a couple of times before this and so had my mom. It worked well. No problems.

I also had a can of starch from the silly English Paper Piecing part of the Craftsy Block of the Month.  I am proud of how my blocks turned out! Anyway... I figured that I was set to go.

Well, I decided that, while waiting a few things out and deciding what I wanted to do, I was going to sew the spine onto cover of a project that I am doing instead of (it was supposed to be in addition to) my niece's quiet book. So, to press that seam, I turned my Iron up to a steam setting. As I was ironing on the Heat-n-Bond to my fabric I did not realize that I had not turned down the setting to a non-steam setting. This turned out to be an integral part of the process. Something so simple caused such a big problem!

So I took my mat with the fabric over to the cricut, got it all set up and started. I figured it would pull a little but not to the extent that it did. I double checked my settings. blade at 5, speed at low, and pressure at high. I had to recut (darn it I was wasting fabric) and the second run through worked pretty well. There was some bunching but not much. One of the videos that I watched on you tube had mentioned that I may need to cut stuff out. That is one reason why detail is not a very good idea.

Well, I had to redo 2 of the letter s (which turned out that I only needed one) and one y. Well, I realized that my ironing on the wrong setting had created bubble pockets where it had over heated the adhesive. Bummer. So the interfacing was stuck on the mat but the fabric was not. That was horrible! I tried to pull of the fabric and I could see the interfacing stuck to the mat. I do not have a scraper. Guess I need to go get one. So frustrated.

Well. Here is what my mat looked like after this mess up. I found some suggestions on how to resticky a mat and am going to give it a try on my 12x12 first since it already has no stickiness left.  But the letter's turned out pretty well. I am satisfied with it, just sad that my mat got a little messed up.