I first saw these tiles at the home of a good friend of mine, and I fell in love with the idea immediately. So when I saw the image on Pinterest, I marked it for later use.  That pin has turned out to be far and away the most-commonly-repinned item on my boards.  Hardly a day goes by when it doesn’t get a pin. So now I’m creating my first original pin.

In any case, I had my eye on this project for Fathers Day, and the kids and I got it done, by the skin of our teeth. Needed:

• Cricut machine
• Cricut vinyl (it’s self-adhesive)
• 12-inch floor tile from Lowe’s

Most of the online tutorials recommend using Cricut Design Studio so you can create the whole thing on the computer and play with it until it’s just right, then cut the whole thing en masse and transfer it en masse. I do not have that program, so I muddled through the same way I do my scrapbook layouts: one letter at a time. However, I did rough it out on paper first:

I also did some test cuts on regular 8 1/2 x 11 paper first, to play with sizes, because I knew that this was a long quote with a lot of words, and it would be easy to cut them too big. As I got things settled in, I made notes on the paper about which cartridges and sizes to use when I started doing the real cuts. Incidentally, I used Storybook and Stone Script for the letters, and the shapes are all off Storybook. The kids did most of the button-pushing, but the transfer of the letters was all up to me.

(Challenge: right at the very end my Stone Script cartridge meandered into oblivion in the hands of one of my two youngest kids. It hasn’t showed up yet, which makes me very unhappy, but in the short run it meant I had to choose a different cartridge for one single letter that needed recutting. Can you find it? 🙂 )

Finished project: