 You guys are always commenting on the labels that I have in my garments and over the years I've kind of gone through a bit of an evolution with garment labels. I was buying them from label weavers for the longest time. Still love their labels so much. But in recent months I have been just making my own. So I am going to be using my Cricut machines today. I have three different labels that I'm going to show you. Two of them use the Cricut machines and one of them does not. It just uses a separate Cricut product. The Explore Air 2 is great for cutting materials like vinyl, paper and other lightweight materials. I'll be using it to cut the vinyl for my skirt project today. You can also use the Cricut Joy to cut lightweight materials like iron on vinyl. And it's perfect for making greeting cards and other projects in 15 minutes or less. I used the Cricut Maker 3 to cut out the leather label. Maker 3 cuts just about every material under the sun including hundreds of fabrics, wood and leather. There are dozens of tools that you can swap out to engrave, deboss, perforate and more. Let's get into the first tutorial and I'm going to be using my Cricut Maker 3 for this one. It's a leather label that I love using in like outerwear on the backs of jeans, on bags, all of that kind of stuff. So let me show you how to make a engraved leather label. Jumping into Cricut Design Space to show you how simple this one is. There's a lot of steps but they really are simple. You just want to type out whatever you want your label to say then pick a font. For these leather labels I really like a nice thick font so the outlines of the letters really stand out. From here you want to select engraving from the operation menu. Next choose a square shape and set it to whatever size you want. For these labels like for coats and jeans I like a nice and big 1 by 3 inch rectangle but do whatever feels right to you. Grab some circles, duplicate them and put them in each of the corners. Select all of this and make sure it's set to basic cut as the operation. Place your text over the rectangle shape and drag to select everything. Then select attach. This will make sure the machine cuts it exactly like you see here. Click make it and follow the on-screen instructions for cutting. You do not have to mirror this image but you will be switching between the engraving tool and the knife or deep cutting blades depending on the material you choose. I chose the thickest leather and had the machine do three passes on the engraving and ten passes with the knife. Next head to your sewing machine and tack down the corners through the four holes you made using either a zigzag stitch that just goes back and forth or like something that you would use to sew on a button. Of course you can always hand sew this as well and then you might also want to take some kind of blunt edge tool and outline your letters just to make them pop a little more. This last step is totally optional. That one is so good and seriously looks so, so, so professional. The next one I'm going to show you is probably the one that's the most sort of entry level whenever it comes to cutting machines and that is making a label using the iron on vinyl. You can make a whole sheet of the operation is set to basic cut to show you how I do it. For this one, the work in Cricut Design Space is even simpler. All you're going to do is type out the text you want and choose your font. Next, toggle the line space down to move the lines of text closer together. Then resize the text to the size you want your label to be. I keep mine around one and a half to two inches wide and whatever height the font allows. That's it. Just click make it and don't forget to mirror this image. You will be using the fine point blade for this and any of Cricut's iron ons. They have so many colors, textures like glitter and holographic and even some prints to choose from. Have some fun with it. So those are great, really user friendly, really great for those who are new to Cricut. And the best part is you really only need the Cricut Joy in order to make those, which is the least expensive of all the cutting machines. Next up, the one that I'm probably most excited about because I just feel like the well, I guess all of them creatively, the possibilities are endless, but this one just feels, I don't know, just so unique and special. And that is using the Cricut Infusible Ink Pins to label your garments and full disclosure. This one is a little bit tricky only because you have to do the reverse. You have to have like a backwards image, which if you're using words like I do, that can be, you know, difficult to do. Thankfully, all the letters in my logo happen to be really easy to draw front and back. So that's no big deal. But I also thought that you could get your kids involved if you're making a gift for someone and they could draw like little smiley faces or hearts or stars and get involved that way. And then also just the idea that your label doesn't have to be something that, you know, like ready to wear designers put in their garments. It's just something most of the time for us garment sewers to denote the back of the garment. So let me show you how to do it. And then I'll talk to you a little bit about some tips and tricks for getting the reverse of your image. Draw your reverse image label onto printer paper and place it face down on your fabric. Next, lay a piece of butcher or parchment paper on top of that. If you have two layers of fabric that are on top of each other, you're also going to want to put card stock in between those two layers to prevent the ink from bleeding through. But then you're just going to follow the instructions on the Cricut Heat Guide, which takes into consideration your fabric you're using and the infusible ink pen or whatever material you are using. You do have to use a heat press with any of these infusible ink products because you need super hot and even heat for the infusible ink to work. But after a minute or so, your handwritten image is perfectly infused into your fabric. It's not like vinyl where it sits on top. It's literally infused and becomes part of the fabric. It's so cool. OK, so like I said, that one does not require a cutting machine. However, if you have a cutting machine, obviously super easily, you can get the machine to draw out whatever your label is and mirror that before it gets drawn. Super easy. But if you don't have a cutting machine and you're just going to go out and buy the infusible ink pens, you can print out a design on your home printer and then use a light box or a window or whatever to transcribe the reverse that way. Also very simple. It will still have kind of like a hand drawn element to it because, you know, the way that our hands draw something versus the way a machine draws something is still going to be a little bit different. But I kind of like the hand drawn element of it. I think that the way that it turned out on my shirt is, you know, kind of cool looking. The only other thing I want to say about infusible ink, whether you're using the pens or the sheets is that you have to be careful what material you are using. You know, as at home sewage, we use all kinds of different fabrics that are made from different things. The infusible ink needs to be transferred at a very high heat. So if your fabric is subject to melting or burning in any way, those materials can burn at the temperature and the amount of time that you are using constant heat on that area. So do a test first always to make sure that your fabric can withstand that amount of heat. If not, then revert to one of the other options that I showed you today. So hopefully this has kind of opened your mind a little bit to the possibilities of, you know, different kinds of labels, maybe not the same kind of labels that you see and ready to wear. But once that definitely served their purpose, whether that's to put your name in it, the size or any other kind of information that you want to put in the clothing for a gift or, you know, to remember anything about it. These are some really great ways to get them into the garments. Of course, you can always use the traditional like satin sew in labels and then use these options for, you know, putting the pattern name or number in it or like I said, the sizing or anything like that. So lots and lots and lots of ways for you to get information about the garment that you made into it using these options with the Cricut machines and tools. So let me know what you think of these ideas. Let me know if you have any questions that came up while you were watching the tutorials. I would really just love to hear if you guys give these a go. So leave them in the comment section below, check the description box for links to the Cricut products that I use today, otherwise that is going to do it for me. And I will see you all very soon. Bye.