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My 12 Days of Cricut Christmas Crafting have been full of wonderful decorating ideas. Today is another one. For Day 11, here is how to make a personalized ribbon garland.

I love the look of a garland that wraps around the Christmas Tree. Quite often you will see some that have messages. It’s so easy to make your own personalized garland. You just need your Cricut and a few supplies.

Supplies Needed to Make a Personalized Ribbon Garland

• Cricut cutting machine. I have the Cricut Maker. The Cricut Explore Air 2 will also work. You just need to be able to cut heat transfer vinyl.
• Heat transfer vinyl in the colour of your choice.
• Wide ribbon (at least 2.5 inches). Make sure it is “wired” ribbon, meaning the edges have wire in them making it easy to manipulate around the tree. If it doesn’t, you may struggle with having it sit up properly – it may flop over.
• A saying for your garland.
• Heat press, Cricut Easy Press or iron to apply the HTV.

Suggestions for Personalization

• Family names
• Song lyrics from your favourite Christmas carol or song
• Scripture (I love Linus’ speech in Charlie Brown’s Christmas)
• Christmas saying or quote

How to Make the Garland

• Type up what you want the garland to say.
• Type it up as one long sentence first. Cricut will tell you it’s too long but don’t worry, we’ll soon be ungrouping it.
• Choose your font and make sure it is spaced nicely. When using cursive fonts on Cricut, it always spaces it weirdly. You’ll have to ungroup and manipulate each letter individually.
• Once you are happy with how it looks, you’re going to group it in chunks to cut. I have a 24-inch cutting mat and so I grouped mine in approximately 23-inch chunks. If you have a 12-inch cutting mat, you’ll want to group them in clusters of about 11 inches. I made it easy by clustering complete words. I didn’t separate my chunks by splitting words up in the middle.
• Once you have your cluster selected, you will want to weld it together so that it becomes one piece. This will also blend all the letters together and join them as one as we ungrouped earlier. Otherwise, they’d all be separate and you’d have some weird cut lines.
• Get your Cricut to cut out these chunks on HTV. Weed as you would normally. Check out my post on All About Heat Transfer Vinyl for details on cutting, weeding and applying.

• If your chunks still seem too long and unwieldy, you can cut them smaller by just using regular scissors and cutting the carrier sheet – not the HTV. Cutting in the middle of a word just makes it too fiddly to piece back together. I did this as 23-inch chunks were too long to work with.

• Apply the HTV to the ribbon. Be sure to leave at least 4 inches at the beginning so that you can make a nice edge. Again, if you find the longer chunks too hard to manage, cut them smaller.
• Due to the length of the ribbon garland I personally found it easier to my Cricut Easy Press and press in small chunks. I found it more manageable this way.
  TIP: depending on the type of ribbon you are using, you may wish to lessen the time that you apply heat. When in doubt, use multiple presses, for shorter times. Once you figure out how well (or not well) your HTV applies to the ribbon, you’ll figure out the timings. Always err on the side of caution and start with less time. I pressed for only 5 seconds but did it a couple of times.
• Once complete, be sure to leave another 4 inches of ribbon at the end – just like you did at the beginning. Trim the edges as you see fit.

This is such a versatile decoration as you can make it say anything you want. There are also many options in terms of ribbon so you can make it match your theme or decor perfectly.

I love how this turned out. I was lucky to find some wide ribbon that matched the personalized tree skirt I made last year.

Want to remember how to make this personalized ribbon garland? Be sure to save this to your favourite Pinterest board.