by Richelle Naegle

Want to make a Mother’s Day Craft that she can enjoy year-round? Subway art is a very trendy craft right now and it allows you to personalize to fit your taste. While I wish I could say this is a fast and easy project, I must admit that it does take some time and some patience. The easy part of the subway art project is there are no rules, no guidelines, and you are free to say what you want and design it the way you choose. By simply turning words on their side or adding simple images you can easily change the feel and design of what I’ve created below into something personal to you. You can use all the same font and just change the size, or if you wish, use a variety of fonts and sizes to create your one of a kind masterpiece.

Making a Subway Art Bag

For this Mother’s Day Cricut subway art I used my Explore Air machine and the Cricut Design Space software. You could also just as easily make it using your gypsy or the Cricut Craftroom just as easily. Or even your Silhouette or other die cutting machine software would work just as easily. I don’t know that I would recommend that you do it without some sort of software though, as it’s hard to make sure all the widths and heights and spacing is going to work before you cut out and waste a lot of Cricut vinyl (but you can use any vinyl), and not to mention time.

OK, so back to the project at hand. I used an 11″ x 14″ piece of wood and painted it all white. You will want to make sure that you don’t have a lot of paint on the board, just enough to cover the wood completely. If you have too much paint when you are trying to peel the transfer tape up it will pick some of the paint off the board.

Choosing Colors

While I didn’t want this project to be all one color, I selected a few vinyl colors mostly using CGull vinyl and a couple of the colors are from the Cricut vinyl line. Some of the fonts are from my own computer fonts, and some are from Cricut cartridges. Cartridges such as Kate’s ABC’s, Chalkboard font, Everyday Fonts, Birthday Cakes, Elegant cakes, and Boys Will Be Boys. Any font cartridges you have will work. There are also some great font cartridges that have many fonts. Try the Everyday Font Cricut cartridge which has seven fonts, so with one cartridge, you can have the best of both worlds.

After you have your design ready to go then you can cut out all your words and images using your Cricut machine, and then carefully “weed” out all your unwanted vinyl, then using the vinyl transfer tape to carefully place your vinyl cut-outs onto your board making sure that they are lined up and straight. Then carefully remove your transfer tape leaving the vinyl on your board.

Want to Simplify this project?

If you wanted to make this project simpler you could cut out all the vinyl using the same color, so that you just have one large piece of vinyl that is already spaced perfectly, from when you designed it.

I hope you have enjoyed this Mother’s Day Craft Project, and that I have inspired you to make something beautiful for you or your mother for Mother’s Day. If you have any Mother’s Day or Subway art craft project that you have made share them with us on our Facebook page or on our Google+ page. Remember to save on Cricut Font cartridges.

Happy creating!