Glitter Vinyl on a Painted Wooden Sign

This summer, I picked up some wooden signs at JoAnne's and I spray painted a couple of them white to use for craft projects. Around Thanksgiving, I made a mod podged sign with one of those painted plaques. Well, the other one was just sitting around, so since I have been enjoying using the Silhouette lately, I thought I'd cut some vinyl for the sign. I perused my collection of free designs from the Silhouette store  I had saved in my Silhouette library and opted for a simple one about love.

Since Valentine's has just passed, I knew I wanted to cut it out in a color that wasn't associated with the holiday, so I could leave it out all year. I opted to try out some glitter vinyl that I picked up on a clearance rack at some point and have been eager to try out. So I googled the settings for glitter vinyl. I set my cut to a depth of 2, speed 5, and force 22. I ran the little test and it worked perfectly. I did set it to do two passes as my blade is a bit dull.

I dropped the vinyl on a cutting mat (it was really rolled up, so the mat will keep it flatter in the machine and it's easier to load).

It came out of the machine looking good, so I went ahead and grabbed my weeding tool and the sign I spray painted and set to work.

It weeded fairly easily since it was a simple design, so I grabbed some of my good paper transfer tape. I did remember seeing that you needed to use really sticky tape for glitter vinyl, but my paper transfer tape has never had any problems sticking (it's like a giant roll of good masking tape). 

Did you notice the foreshadowing?? Well, my paper transfer tape stick. I burnished like crazy and pulled it off carefully, but the glitter vinyl wouldn't stick. And, to make matters worse, the depth/force was set too strong on the cut. The vinyl would not come off without peeling up part of the paper backing. I even tried some clear transfer tape that isn't as sticky in case it just worked better with this type of vinyl. Unfortunately I ended up having to recut the design. This time I set the blade depth back to 1 and lowered the force slightly to 20. The second attempt also cut the design pretty cleanly, but this time, the paper backing wasn't also cut. So I applied my good transfer tape and tried again.

I can normally peel transfer tape off of the paper backing and the vinyl will stick with it. This time, I had to flip the design over and carefully peel back (and pull the vinyl off with my weeding pick) the paper backing. Even then, some of the letters wouldn't stick. They would stick to everything but the transfer tape.

There was a lot of swearing while I was pulling this tape off. the letters kept wanting to stick back onto the paper backing, and when they came free, they didn't want to stick to the transfer tape. They'd just start floating around.

After much shouting, I finally got the design free of the paper backing, but it still wouldn't stick to the transfer tape. So I just winged it and plunked it over onto the wooden sign and hoped for the best.

It wasn't perfectly aligned and there were a few areas where the vinyl bubbled, but I was either able to smooth it out or the glitter texture mostly hid it, so it turned out ok in the end. After my frustrating afternoon of crafting, I did some googling. It turns out that Cricut has special transfer tape they recommend for this vinyl, and they even include 1 sheet of it with the pack of vinyl and I totally didn't see it, so now I'll have to try another project just to see if the tape works better (though they only sent along enough transfer tape for one sheet's worth). The internet also recommended burnishing the back and reducing the force of the cut. So I have a couple of other things to try to hopefully salvage using this infuriating glitter vinyl for future projects.

Even with all the swearing, I ended up with a cute little sign and a reminder for us all!