Personalized Christmas Eve Sign (Cut Wood with Cricut!)

This DIY Cricut Christmas craft is a personalized Christmas Eve sign for Santa! It’s the perfect gift idea for families with young children. Cut the wood with your Cricut Maker and iron on vinyl to the wood with this free design. 

This Cricut Christmas Craft is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.

We’ve finally hit that point in life where we have enough ‘stuff’ and mostly pretty stuff too. So when it comes to deciding on which Christmas Cricut crafts to make for the holidays- I’m trying to focus on things that will become parts of our decor for years to come and one of the ways to make that happen? Personalize them! And make traditions around them!

Today’s Cricut Christmas craft is this DIY sign for Santa to leave out on Christmas eve from your kids – I’m excited to show you how to make this!

This post is in partnership with Cricut… which is how I was able to cut this wood without pulling out the scroll saw! I’m so so happy with how it turned out and can’t wait to make it part of our tradition, leaving milk and cookies out for Santa!

Before I get to the tutorial… did you know that the Cricut Maker cuts wood?! I’ve done it a couple times (like for this tablescape!) and really love how I’m able to get that custom cut look without spending the amount of time I know it takes me to cut the shapes out with a scroll saw. When you can go with a thinner wood… this is a total game changer!

For this personalized Christmas Eve sign, I wanted to have the sign stand the test of time. The Cricut Maker cuts 1/16” basswood which is reasonably sturdy, but I wanted to know it would hold up so I cut two sheets and glued them together for extra strength. This will totally stick with our family for years now! This would also make a rad gift, just personalize it with their family name.

You can grab the file I designed in Cricut Design Space right here, it uses all images and fonts in Cricut Access. The font I used for this Cricut Christmas craft is called A Frightful Affair (it’s my fave for anything kid related, I’ve used it here… and here). You can just add in your family name at the bottom and hit ‘make it!’. Easy, right?!

For the wood, I cut two of that sheet again, just to make it twice as sturdy.

The triangles are totally optional. They make a stand that you can glue on but it does make it harder for kids to write on, so I have chosen not to use mine.

Before you cut, make sure to set up your Cricut for the wood! Move all your star wheels (the little white grippers that help feed the mat through) to the right and swap in your knife blade. This cut takes a LONG time, so do yourself a favor and walk away. Check back every 5 or 10 minutes just to make sure it’s not stuck. I found my knife blade has dulled and it stuck a few times. You blow the sawdust off and hit go and it will keep going!

This is what a rough cut looks like due to a dull knife blade. I will be replacing it before I cut with wood again!

Once you’ve cut this twice, move on to the iron on! Switch back to the fine point blade and make sure to mirror your image.

Last but not least, you can cut the chalkboard area out of chalkboard vinyl or you can paint chalkboard on to the sign. I hadn’t planned to add chalkboard to this until I was busy designing and thought that would be a sweet tradition to have the kids draw a picture or write a note so I didn’t have any chalkboard vinyl on hand, but have included that as part of the Cricut Christmas craft design file for you!

Once everything is cut, time to glue your sign together! I used super glue because I’m impatient and love that 30 second dry time but wood glue would work fine as well. After the two sheets of basswood are glued together, I took 180 grit sandpaper and sanded all the edges to make the two pieces seamless.

Then I applied my iron on design! I use 300 degrees for 40 seconds for transferring to wood but I found this time with the Every Day Iron On that was a little much. I think I will try for 35 seconds next time. I always use my Cricut EasyPress for transferring iron on now- the large one was perfect to cover this entire surface without moving it!

After you iron on your design, you can either apply your chalkboard vinyl or chalkboard paint… then it’s ready to go! If you prefer traditional holiday colours for your Cricut Christmas craft, swap out the black for a festive green or red… or mix it up and do both!

Alright, that’s it for this personalized Christmas eve sign! Do you like personalized holiday decor and gifts? I’m going to be rounding up some of my fave personalized crafts using the Cricut next week because I just can’t get enough this year! In the meantime… you can see all my past Cricut projects right here!

* Are you new to Cricut? Or deciding which machine to buy? I wrote a whole post about the differences between the cricut machines RIGHT HERE. And if you’re looking for more Cricut projects, Christmas crafts and tutorials, you can find them all here!