Personalized Dance Bag

Updated on January 4, 2023

My daughter has been in dance for several years now. She loves it! To keep us organized during the week with school, kid’s activities, work, and everyday life, I try to keep a separate bag ready for each activity. This helps us to be able to simply grab the bag we need and go. My daughter had been using a spare tote bag, but I wanted to personalize something just for her, so I created this personalized dance bag.

Supplies:

• Canvas Tote Bag
• Cricut Explore Air 2
• Glitter Iron-on (Glitter Lipstick, White Glitter, Glitter Jade)
• Iron-on Lite (Aqua)
• EasyPress or Iron

I started by using Cricut Design Space to create exactly what I wanted the bag to look like. There are pre-made templates you can use, but my tote bag was kind of a weird size, so I simply created a rectangle with the dimensions of the bag using the shape tool.

I searched in the images for “ballet”. (You could also search “dance”.) I found some pretty ballet slippers to use in my design. I resized the image using the double arrow in the lower right corner to fit inside the rectangle.

I added text. I chose the Quirky Script Cricut font. I spelled out my daughter’s name – Olivia.

The letters were spaced too far apart, and I wanted them to be closer together. After selecting my text I used the letter spacing tool at the top. I squished the letters together until they were all touching.

The O of Olivia ended up being too close to the rest of the letters. To fix this, I ungrouped the letters. With the text selected at the top click on the Advanced drop-down menu. Then select, Ungroup to Letters. This allows you to move each individual letter.

Once I had the O where I wanted it, I selected all of the letters and clicked on the Weld tool to attach them all together.

Since I was cutting the ballet slippers out of iron on rather than paper, I didn’t want a bunch of layers of iron-on overlapping. So first, I ungrouped the ballet slippers images. Then, I chose both the ribbon and the slippers. Once I had those two layers selected, I clicked Slice. This cuts the pieces apart. You can then go ahead and delete any extra pieces.

Helpful tip: You can only slice two layers at a time. So, if you are having trouble, or slice is greyed out, ungroup your images and then do two images at a time.

Next, I repeated this process again using the slippers and the inner lining of the slipper. Select both images, then click Slice. Delete any extra pieces you don’t need.

Now, I wanted to color my design to match my iron on. I used aqua Iron-On Lite for the name. I used glitter iron-on for all of the pieces of the ballet slipper design.

Cricut Design Space File: Personalized Dance Bag

The design is ready to cut out. Either delete the rectangle background or click the little eye next to the layer to keep it from being cut out. When you open your mat preview page, be sure to click Mirror Image on each mat.

For the glitter iron-on set the Smart Set Dial to custom and then choose glitter iron-on. For the iron-on lite, you can simply set the Smart Set Dial to iron-on.

Place the iron-on on the mat with the liner (shiny) side down. Cut out each layer.

Helpful Link: Iron-On Glitter: Cutting and Application Instructions

I like to use the BrightPad to help me when weeding any iron on or vinyl. It helps me to see the lines in the design. 

Weed all four pieces of vinyl.

I used the EasyPress to adhere the iron-on to the bag. I started with the iron-on lite. Follow the recommended settings that come with the EasyPress to adhere your iron-on to the bag.

Helpful link: EasyPress Recommended Settings

I did each layer one at a time. I used a piece of iron-on protective paper over the layers that were already attached so they didn’t stick to my EasyPress. Be sure to flip the bag over and use the EasyPress one last time on the back side to be sure the iron-on is really stuck down.

My daughter loves that her bag is sparkly. 

And I love that we can stay organized and ready to go each week for her class!

 

Find all the Cricut products used in this post at shop.cricut.com or Amazon.com.

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