How to Make a Cookies and Milk Placemat for Santa

Welcome to Day 9 of my 12 Days of Cricut Christmas Crafting. Today’s project is how to make a Cookies and Milk placemat for Santa.

Leaving out cookies and milk for Santa is a wonderful tradition that many families do. You can personalize a mug for Santa by using adhesive vinyl. You can also personalize a plate using adhesive vinyl as well.

But the cookies and milk for Santa placemat is a bit of a twist on that. What makes this brilliant is that you can now use ANY cup or mug and ANY plate for the cookie or cookies. In fact, since it’s a placemat you can even get away with no plate at all.

The cookies and milk placemat is simply that – a placemat for Santa. It is labelled for the cookie (or cookies) and milk for Santa. You can even add a carrot for the reindeer, or Rudolph.

What You Need to Make a Cookies and Milk Placemat for Santa

placemat – you can Christmas placemats at a number of places including the dollar store. You could even just have a rectangular piece of fabric that had the edges finished.
heat transfer vinyl – the colour is up to you. As the Christmas placemats I chose were red and green, I thought that white would stand out nicely. I had some nice white glitter HTV I wanted to try
graphic design
Cricut machine to cut the HTV
heat press, Cricut Easy Press or iron to adhere the HTV to the placemat

The Graphic Elements of the Placemat Design

In order to make the graphic design for the placemat, consider what needs to be on it.

a place for the cookie or cookies – this can simply be designated by a circle and/or an arrow, along with some text explaining what goes there.
a place for the milk – again designated by a circle and/or an arrow and also with some text.
optional – a place for the carrot. I just used an arrow. You can use text, as well as a carrot graphic.
if you want to personalize it, include a “Dear Santa” as well as a “Love from” and the child/children’s names
I like to fill up the empty spots with snowflakes, which works really well since I’m using white HTV. This is completely up to you of course. Add in any other design elements you think would go well.

How to Make the Cookies and Milk Placemat for Santa

Once you have all the elements, play with the layout. Move the items around you are happy with how it looks.

Make sure it is sized correctly. Here’s a tip – I make a rectangle the size of the placemat to help me figure out my layout. Be sure that your finished graphic ends up at least half an inch smaller on all 4 sides.

Once you are happy with the layout simply attach all the elements so that when you send it to cut, it stays all together.

Cut your design using heat transfer vinyl. It can be regular vinyl, but also consider using glitter vinyl (that’s what I used) or even flock for a neat texture.

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Then, as you would with any HTV project, weed the graphic and apply using the appropriate temperature on your heat-press/Easy Press/iron based on the type of HTV that you are using. For more details on how to apply HTV, check out my post on All About Heat Transfer Vinyl.

Change your mind about the layout? No worries, as long as you haven’t applied the HTV, you can cut apart your graphic. Just cut the plastic carrier sheet – but sure to go around the HTV and you can rearrange the layout.

What I love about this project is that the placemat is easy to store for the rest of the year. Simply fold or roll it up and put it away with the rest of your Christmas decorations.