Working with Faux Leather and Cricut Joy Extra
One of my new projects this year was to try and make faux leather earrings. Faux leather is just a fabric, so you can (mostly) source it from anywhere - it doesn;t have to be Cricut branded. I got mine from Amazon in a batch of A5 sheets to experiment with.
I had to remember that choosing my cut-outs for within my earring designs had to take into account that everything had to be touching the main body of the earring in some way, shape or form, after all, parts can’t float in mid air!. I fortunately did remember this, so no mishaps there.
The next thing I realised was that if the cut outs were not symmetrical, then I would need to flip horizontally for the second one, so that the earrings matched properly. I fell foul on this a couple of times, just being silly and forgetting to do that.
The designs were simple, as I didn’t want to be trying to weed tiny parts from an unfamiliar medium. But I did do one design that included a multi-petalled daisy, so I had a more complex cut to experiment with.
My first cut went well, but then I realised that the faux leather is far to soft and floppy to use as it was. So I then cut a second sheet to use as a backing sheet. It didn’t matter if I forgot to mirrow the second cat to go on the reverse because of the pattern designs I had chosen.
I glued these two together using mod podge. Big mistake! The mod podge was absorbed by the faux leather fabric, and even where it wasn;t absorbed, most of it just didn’t stick. Apparently I needed something like an E6000 glue! It was quite frustraing after spending quite some time gluing only to discover this didn’t work. I expect taht a fabric glue, hot glue etc will all work. Just not mod podge!
After finally getting my front and back stuck together, I realised that they still were not thick enough. I need to put interfacing in between to make the earrings firm and solid.
With cutting the faux leather, each piece I cut was a new adventure. The A5 sample bag had so many different textures and I soon ran into trouble. Some of the faux leather has a fluffy-ish back side. Not great! The fluff doesn;t cut well, so the cricut blade goes through the leathery part fine, yet when it is time to separate the pieces from the main fabric sheet, the fluff sometimes remained attached, and iI couldn’t separate then cut pieces out. Also, the edges of the bigger peices that I did manage to get were not clean cuts. They were full-on hairy-arse things I would need to hand cut afterwards, so no point machine cutting them. In retrospect, I may put interfacing to the back of the leather before cutting in future - though I am not sure how the iron-on glude part of it will go through the cutter. SOmething to experiment with.
With the faux leather in a lot of cases, the tinier designs were impossible to weed. Soft thin faux leather with no fluff at the back was fine, but the thicker and fluffier it was, the more ended up in the bin. Don’t even think about cutting out a little hole to put jump rings through! I will have to buy a 1mm punch for that!
When the fabric was going through the cricut machine, the blade kept catching in the fluff and pulling th fabric off the cutting mat and jamming the works. So frustrating! To get around this, I was using the strongest grip mat and still having to tape the faux leather down with masking tape, trying to make sure no tape was in the cutting zone.
In the end, I had quite a lot of wastage. I don;t mind though. Learning and experimenting is part of the fun. Now that I have practiced, (and shouted and cursed), a lot, I think I have finally got this. I will be working on my first batch of earring this week, and looking forward to getting some products out in a new medium!