Babies can be really light sleepers, and the worst thing in the world for new parents who just got their baby to go to sleep, is to have them wake back up as soon as the nursery door closes! Luckily, door latch covers are super easy to make, and they allow you to close the nursery door without waking your baby!

Yep, there’s a little dinosaur on that door latch cover! Just slip the elastics over each doorknob and the door will shut silently! And it’s thin enough that the door does still shut, the latch just won’t click. These are also great for when the kid is a little older, to prevent them from pushing a door shut and locking themselves in a room if they’re still too small to turn the doorknob!

DIY Nursery Door Latch Cover

These only take a few minutes to put together, and only require a few materials:

• fun printed cotton
• 2 hair elastics
• sewing machine and basic supplies (scissors, pins, thread, etc.)

Start by cutting two 3″ x 4″ rectangles out of your cotton fabric. (I made two latch covers, so I cut four rectangles.)

Set one rectangle on your table, printed side up. Place one elastic on top of the rectangle so that a bit of it hangs off the short left side of the fabric, and place the other elastic similarly on the right side. Place the other rectangle on top of the elastics, printed side down.

Pin the fabric and elastics well, and sew all the way around all four edges with 1/4″ seam allowance, leaving a 2″ hole for turning in one of the long edges. Go back and forth a few times over the elastic to make sure it is secure!

Clip the corners and turn the latch cover right side out. Top stitch all the way around with 1/8″ seam allowance in order to close the turning hole. And you’re done! Your elastics should be sticking out of either short edge.

Cute dino, right?! If you pay attention when cutting your original rectangles of fabric, you can choose which parts of the fabric show in your final latch cover.

Just slip the elastic over a doorknob, wrap the cover around the edge of the door, and hook the other elastic over the doorknob on the other side.

Now your doors won’t wake the baby once they finally get to sleep!

What are your favorite baby shower gifts to give? If you’ve had a baby shower, what were your favorite gifts to receive?

The post DIY Nursery Door Latch Cover is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

I love summertime! The weather is warm, the sun is always out, and there’s no school! What’s not to like?! But the best thing about summer is eating popsicles! So today I’m rounding up 10 delicious, refreshing popsicle recipes to keep you cool this summer!

10 Cool Refreshing Popsicle Recipes!

Please click over to the original recipe before pinning any of the photos below!

Fruit Smoothie Popsicles from I Dig Pinterest

Fourth Of July Yogurt Pops from The Winthrop Chronicles

Blueberry Yogurt Bars from Not Just A Housewife

Honeydew Melon Berry Pops from Will Cook For Smiles

Cherry Apple Whiskey Sour Popsicles from Bakers Royale

Watermelon And Cantaloupe Aguas Frescas Popsicles from A Little Inspiration

Raspberry Cheesecake Popsicles from The Comfort Of Cooking

Lemon Blueberry Popsicles from Chocolate And Carrots

Striped Juice Pops from The View From Great Island

Berry Yogurt Popsicles from Skinnytaste.com

What is your favorite refreshing summer treat? I’m pretty partial to popsicles, but I can be convinced to have a sno-cone or a smoothie instead sometimes.

The post 10 Cool Refreshing Summer Popsicle Recipes! is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

The creativity of the projects linked up each week at The Fun In Functional link party blows me away! Today I’m rounding up some of the amazing creative ideas that stood out last week!

Please click over to the original blog before pinning! The images below are “un-pinnable” and won’t appear as an option if you pin this post. If you want to learn to make your own images un-pinnable, check out this simple tutorial!

DIY PVC Pipe Succulent Planters from The Happier Homemaker

Dish Towel Tote Bag from Just A Girl And Her Blog

Wrapping Station Reveal from Neat Little Nest

Make Your Own Flavored Mayo from Lemon Tree Dwelling

Shrimp Scampi from Love Bakes Good Cakes on My Turn For Us

Cinnamon Sugar Pie Crust Cookies from Amy’s Cooking Adventures

Grapefruit Pom Mint Fizz from Salt Tree

If you were featured, feel free to grab a Featured button from the footer! And if you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Creative Ideas roundup, stop by on Friday at 5pm CT and link up to the next Fun In Functional link party!

The post 7 Creative Ideas! | Projects, Crafts, Recipes, and More! is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

Welcome to The Fun In Functional, the weekly link party hosted on Practically Functional!

Hey guess what?! This is the 52nd Fun In Functional link party, which means it’s now a year old! (Actually a little older cuz I skipped a week or two, but who’s counting?!) Thank you guys for linking up each week and totally rocking this party! I’m seriously impressed with your creativity and skill every single week, and I’m always excited to see what you link up each Friday!

If you’re new here, I throw this party once a week on Fridays and it runs through the weekend. It’s a place for you find some inspiration and show off your own creativity. At the bottom of this post you’ll find links to a bunch of awesome projects, recipes, crafts, tutorials, and more; feel free to browse around and visit any of the links that interest you! And if you have something of your own that you want to share, just link it up below!

In case you missed last week’s party, I rounded up a few of the fabulous projects that stood out last week. You can see them here! And the most popular project from last week’s party was the roundup of Laundry Room Printables shared on I Gotta Create! There are a bunch of printables here and they’re all super cute!

Please support the blogging community by clicking on any links that interest you and visiting the blog behind the idea. Your visits are important to the bloggers who share their work here! If you link up to the party this week, please visit and comment on a few other blogs as well. There’s no downside to networking with other bloggers and finding new ideas!

Now on to this week’s party!

Just a few guidelines to keep it fun, friendly, and fair:

• Please, no Etsy shops, giveaways, link parties, etc. And no posts you have linked up before: we want to see your new stuff!
• Help spread the news by grabbing a link party button from the footer!
• Comment on at least 2 other posts. We all love new visitors, comments, and link party love!
• HAVE FUN!

I will be featuring a few of my favorite projects each week on the blog and sharing projects on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and Pinterest throughout the week, so be sure to follow along to see all the crafty goodness!

By linking up your projects, you are giving me permission to feature or share them! Also, I will send out a quick email reminder to everyone who has linked up once the party is live each week. If you no longer want to receive those reminders, just click Unsubscribe at the top of the email!

Link up any crafts, tutorials, tips and tricks, ideas, recipes, DIY projects (any project really!) you have worked on recently that you want to share!

The post The Fun In Functional! {Link Party #52} is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

It gets really really cold here in Chicago during the winter, so when my cousin announced she was pregnant, I knew exactly what I wanted to make as a baby shower gift: a warm, fuzzy, waterproof car seat canopy to protect her sleeping baby from crazy weather!

If you live somewhere with cold winters, a car seat canopy is perfect for protecting a sleeping baby from temperature changes, wind, rain, or snow when moving between the house and the car. I know when I was a baby, I probably hated being woken up and pulled out of a nice warm car to make the trip into the house!

I found this tutorial and was totally inspired to make my own canopy! But go check hers out, it’s patchwork and it’s adorable!

DIY Car Seat Canopy Tutorial

If you have basic sewing skills, this project should be a breeze! Here’s what you need:

• 1.5 yards of soft fleece, interior
• 1.5 yards of polyurethane laminate (PUL), exterior
• cargo netting for the window
• 1/4 yard of cotton for the straps
• 10″-12″ of velcro
• a sewing machine and basic sewing supplies (pins, fabric scissors, thread, etc.)
• an iron and ironing board

A car seat canopy may seem like a daunting project, but I promise it’s a lot easier than it looks! The window is the hardest part; for a simpler project, just make the canopy without a window!

The first step is to choose your fabric. Depending on where you live, you could probably get away with making the entire canopy out of a fun printed cotton fabric, but because we’re in Chicago, cotton wasn’t gonna cut it! I chose a soft lime green fleece for the interior of the canopy to help insulate the baby and the car seat from the wind and the cold. For the exterior I used some leftover PUL. PUL is waterproof which is perfect for anywhere with rainy or snowy winters, and it comes in adorable baby patterns because people usually use it to make homemade diaper covers!

The next step is to cut out your pieces. I don’t have a specific pattern for you because every car seat is slightly different, but basically you’re going to cut out a wonky figure 8 from both your interior and exterior fabrics.

The measurements on the photo above are approximate; yours may vary slightly depending on which car seat you have. The most important measurement is the skinny section between the top half and the bottom half. That needs to be exactly the width of the car seat plus 3″ on either side so that when you hang the canopy from the handle, it fits in between the two sides of the handle without bunching.

The other important thing is to make sure that the canopy is tall enough and wide enough to cover the entire car seat and hang over the edges a bit. This one is 50″ total from top to bottom and 48″ wide at it’s widest point, and as you can see in the finished photos, it leaves plenty of room for hanging over the edges!

NOTE: If your piece of fabric isn’t big enough to cut out the whole shape in one piece, just cut out the top and bottom portions separately and then sew them together with a line across the middle!

Once your fabric pieces are cut, line them up on top of each other, right sides in, and pin all the way around. Sew around the entire edge with about 1/4″ seam, leaving a 5″ hole for turning it inside out. Once you’ve sewn the pieces together, turn it inside out, but don’t close the hole just yet!

Adding a window:

If you want to make a windowless canopy, just skip straight to the straps section! Otherwise, cut out a small window from both pieces (this one is about 8″ wide by 6″ tall) about 3″ down from the skinny middle part of your canopy.

In order to make the inside edges of my window nice looking, I made a small 45 degree cut into each corner of the window and folded the extra fabric in so the raw edges would be hidden inside the finished canopy.

Repeat for all four edges of the window in both pieces of fabric and iron the folds. Quick note here: Never iron the waterproof side of PUL or it will melt! For these folds in the PUL, iron from the printed fabric side for a second or two, just long enough to put a crease in the fold, but not so long that the heat of the iron goes all the way through and melts the back side!

Once your edges are pressed, cut a piece of cargo netting about an inch bigger than your window on all sides and put it inside the canopy through the turning hole (where you turned the canopy inside out). This will allow you to leave the raw edges of the netting inside the canopy so you have nice “finished” edges whether you’re looking at the inside or outside.

Stretch the netting out taught across the window, make sure the folds are still folded towards the inside of the canopy, and pin it all in place. If you could look at a cross section of one of the window edges, you would have PUL on top, then the 1/4″ of folded back PUL, then the netting, then the 1/4″ of folded fleece, and then the entire fleece backing on the bottom. Top stitch around all four corners of your window, making sure to sew through all layers of all three fabrics.

Adding a window cover:

If it’s cold where you live, you might want to add a cover over your window so that heat doesn’t escape through the netting when you’re not using it. Also, if you leave the window uncovered, rain and snow can fall in on your baby, which I’m sure they won’t like!

Luckily it’s really easy to make a window cover! Cut out two pieces of fabric that are 2″ bigger than your window on all sides. I used two pieces of fleece instead of one piece of fleece and one piece of PUL because I thought the lime green color would be a fun accent on the exterior of the canopy, but it doesn’t really matter which two fabrics you use!

Place the two pieces together, right sides in, and sew around all four edges, leaving a 2″ hole for turning. Turn the cover right side out and close the hole. Center the cover over your window and sew the bottom edge onto the outside of the canopy. This will let gravity help keep the window cover open when you want to see in. Sew on two small pieces of velcro at the top corners (with the corresponding velcro pieces sewn onto the canopy itself just above the window corners) to help keep the window cover closed.

Now you have a window and a window cover!

Adding straps:

The last step is to add straps to your canopy. (If you skipped the window section, close the turning hole in your canopy at this point.)

Cut out two 8″ squares from a piece of fun printed cotton. I made these straps using the same method I used for this diaper strap. That post has a full tutorial with tons of pictures, but I’ll briefly repeat the instructions here as well. Fold one square in half, right side out, and press the fold. Then open up the fold and fold the bottom of the square up until the raw edge meets the center fold you just pressed. Press the new fold, and repeat for the top. Then refold your original fold and press. You now have a long strip of fabric with folds instead of raw edges! Top stitch around all edges of the strip, and then repeat for the other square.

Once you have two strips of fabric, add a small piece of velcro to each end so that you can fold the strip into a loop held closed by velcro. Then sew the middle of each strap onto the skinny middle part of your canopy, about 8″-10″ apart from each other.

And you’re finished! Velcro the straps onto the handle of your car seat, and you’re good to go! The middle of the canopy is held up by the straps, and the back is held up by the back of the car seat, so you don’t have to worry about the canopy falling down onto any sleeping children.

Keep the window cover closed to protect your baby from wind, rain, or snow. Or open it up to take a peek inside to make sure all is still well!

And you don’t have to remove the cover to put your kid in the car seat or to take him out; just lift up the entire bottom half!

The reason I had leftover PUL with adorable dinos on it is because I made a diaper bag for a friend and lined it with PUL so she could easily clean out any spills! (Tutorial coming soon, I promise!) What else would you use PUL for?

The post DIY Waterproof Car Seat Canopy! is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

Anyone who sews knows that it is a labor of love! Just like signing a painting, you can tag your sewing projects and mark your hard work as your own. So I’m going to show you how to make your own custom printed fabric tags with items you probably already have in your house!

I just LOVE having custom printed fabric tags! They are a great way of saying “I did this and I’m proud of it!” when I make gifts for people, and they give my projects a finished, professional look, which is great for the items I sell in my shop. Plus, they’re so simple to make!

There are a bunch of different ways to print on fabric and make the ink “permanent” but I tested a couple of them and found that the method in this tutorial from Dolls And Daydreams worked the best!

DIY Printed Fabric Tags

You only need a few things to make your own fabric tags!

• 100% cotton muslin fabric
• a computer and inkjet printer
• freezer paper
• white vinegar
• baking tray or dish
• iron and ironing board
• scissors

The first thing you need to do is print on your fabric! If you remember last Christmas I shared a tutorial for making printed fabric gift tags, which I made by taping a piece of fabric to a piece of card stock and feeding it in through my printer. That method works really great for heavier fabric, but for the thin cotton muslin I used for these tags, I decided to use the freezer paper method instead. Luckily, it’s just as simple!

Start by cutting out a piece of freezer paper about the size of a standard sheet of paper. You’ll notice that freezer paper has a shiny side and a matte side; place the shiny side down onto the back of your fabric (muslin doesn’t really have a front and a back, so don’t worry too much about that!) Then iron the paper down onto your fabric for a few seconds. You don’t need to iron it for very long for it to stick, and if you get any air bubbles, just iron that spot again!

Make sure your iron doesn’t touch the shiny side of the paper or it will melt all over!

Once the paper is stuck to the fabric everywhere, trim it down to exactly 8.5″ x 11″, and make sure to trim any loose threads or they could smudge your tags when printing. Now you have a sheet of fabric on one side and paper on the other.

Now it’s time to design your label! I decided to just use my logo, but you can make your tags say anything you want! Put your logo on them, say “Made with love by…”, put washing instructions on them…whatever you want!

Make sure you space your designs out a bit from each other so that you have enough extra fabric to fold it into tags later. You want to leave about 1x the width of your design in blank space on the left and right, and about 3x the height of your design above and below. (You can always print out a test sheet on some scrap paper, and cut the logos apart to make sure you’ll have enough extra blank fabric to fold it into a label once it’s printed.)

Once your spacing is set up correctly, feed the freezer paper/fabric into your printer so that it will print onto the fabric side, not the paper side. Then print out your tags!

Once your tags are printed, let the ink dry for a few minutes, then gently peel the freezer paper off the back of the fabric.

Printer ink isn’t permanent on fabric, so to help set the ink into the fabric you’re going to give it a little vinegar bath. Place your sheet of fabric in a flat baking dish and pour in some white vinegar, just enough to barely cover the fabric.

Leave the fabric in the vinegar bath for about five minutes, then pull it out and rinse it under cold water to get rid of the vinegar smell.

Now lay the fabric flat and let it dry. Or if you’re impatient like me, grab a hair dryer and go nuts! Once your fabric is totally dry, cut your tags apart and fold each one into a tag.

I found the easiest way to do this was to use a scrap piece of card stock paper, cut to exactly the width of my finished tag. I laid one single tag, centered, over the cardboard.

I folded both sides under, around to the back of the card stock, and ironed the folds.

Then I pulled the card stock out and folded my tag in half, with the crease just above the top of the printed design. I put my card stock back into the fold to make sure my fold was perfectly straight.

Then I ironed that final fold, pulled out the card stock, and my label was finished!

Now just stick that tag into a seam in your project and sew it right in! Don’t worry about frays or uneven cuts on the bottom; that’s the part that will be inside your seam in your finished piece!

I folded my fabric tags three times like this because I found that cotton muslin is pretty see-through and I wanted my tags to be a bit more solid. Also, this way I have a double-sided tag! The pictures above are of tags with just my logo on them, but I made two other batches of tags that have my logo on one side and washing instructions on the other side!!! I find a lot of people worry about washing handmade items, so I like to think a tag with washing instructions will help alleviate those fears!

I used these tags with washing instructions on the gifts I made for my cousin’s baby shower. Specific washing instructions can help people figure out the best way to care for your gifts. The tag in the middle is for most cotton projects, and the tag on the right is for projects with delicate fabrics in them like minky or velvet. And the one-sided tag is for anything that really shouldn’t be washed at all, like my hot pad purse organizer.

And if you’re worried about the ink washing out when you wash your finished work, don’t be! I have washed my projects tons of times and the tags still look like new! I even did a little test to see what it would take to get the ink to come off. Turns out it takes a heck of a lot of soap and about ten minutes of vigorous scrubbing with a toothbrush! And even then, the ink is only about halfway gone; you can definitely still read the tag!

You can also use this method to make no-sew tags! Just follow all the same instructions, but when you get to the end, iron each individual tag onto fusible fabric interfacing like Heat’n Bond instead of folding them up. Then you can iron your tags directly onto your project and skip the sewing part! This way you can still tag your no-sew fabric projects too!

You can stick a pin through your folded labels to keep them together until you’re ready to use them!

Do you tag your work when you sew, or sign your drawings, or watermark your photos? I like the tags because it lets people know I made it by hand, and also, if I’m ever rich and famous, maybe my little projects will be worth that much more because they were “signed” by me!!!

Disclosure: The materials section of this post contains affiliate links to the products I used for this project. Any purchases you make through those links help me to keep this blog running!

The post Make Your Own Custom Printed Fabric Tags! is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

The creativity of the projects linked up each week at The Fun In Functional link party blows me away! Today I’m rounding up some of the amazing creative ideas that stood out last week!

Please click over to the original blog before pinning! The images below are “un-pinnable”; if you want to learn to make your own images un-pinnable, check out this simple tutorial!

Vintage Toolbox Garden from Homeroad

How To Paint Garage Doors from Linley House

Three Dimensional Fruit Wall Art from Sew Can Do

DIY Wine Cork Plant Markers from The Happier Homemaker

Glass Insulator and Bed Spring Candle Holders from Restyled Junk

Homemade Playdough Recipe from Domestic Superhero

Gingerbread Waffle Recipe from A Tossed Salad Life

S’Mores Cookies from Amy’s Cooking Adventures

Chocolate Raspberry and Chocolate Cherry Cookies from Sweet Southern Blue

Watermelon Mint Iced Tea from Family Home & Life

Grapefruit Lemon Thyme Granita from Salt Tree

If you were featured, feel free to grab a Featured button from the footer! And if you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Creative Ideas roundup, stop by on Friday at 5pm CT and link up to the next Fun In Functional link party!

The post 11 Creative Ideas! | Projects, Crafts, Recipes, and More! is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

Welcome to The Fun In Functional, the weekly link party hosted on Practically Functional!

I’m glad for the warm weather and sun because a) the local farmer’s market is back in town, and it inspired a super fun project and b) I can go outside and paint, which means I have a few other awesome projects I can finally make some progress on! Summer is definitely the best!

If you’re new here, I throw this party once a week on Fridays and it runs through the weekend. It’s a place for you find some inspiration and show off your own creativity. At the bottom of this post you’ll find links to a bunch of awesome projects, recipes, crafts, tutorials, and more; feel free to browse around and visit any of the links that interest you! And if you have something of your own that you want to share, just link it up below!

In case you missed last week’s party, I rounded up a few of the fabulous projects that stood out last week. You can see them here! And the most popular project from last week’s party was these super easy DIY pillow covers shared on Enjoy The View. I love simple projects like this!

Please support the blogging community by clicking on any links that interest you and visiting the blog behind the idea. Your visits are important to the bloggers who share their work here! If you link up to the party this week, please visit and comment on a few other blogs as well. There’s no downside to networking with other bloggers and finding new ideas!

Now on to this week’s party!

Just a few guidelines to keep it fun, friendly, and fair:

• Please, no Etsy shops, giveaways, link parties, etc. And no posts you have linked up before: we want to see your new stuff!
• Help spread the news by grabbing a link party button from the footer!
• Comment on at least 2 other posts. We all love new visitors, comments, and link party love!
• HAVE FUN!

I will be featuring a few of my favorite projects each week on the blog and sharing projects on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and Pinterest throughout the week, so be sure to follow along to see all the crafty goodness!

By linking up your projects, you are giving me permission to feature or share them! Also, I will send out a quick email reminder to everyone who has linked up once the party is live each week. If you no longer want to receive those reminders, just click Unsubscribe at the top of the email!

Link up any crafts, tutorials, tips and tricks, ideas, recipes, DIY projects (any project really!) you have worked on recently that you want to share!

The post The Fun In Functional! {Link Party #51} is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

Our trip to Disney World a few weeks ago was totally awesome! I am working on a post or two with some tips and tricks we picked up while we were there, but for now I want to share a little Disney craft I did before we left. Disney will always bring out the kid in you if you let it, so I decided to make myself a pair of Minnie Mouse ear hair clips to wear while we were there!

They’re super cute, and totally functional! Now that my hair is short, it’s hard to keep it out of my face sometimes, but these little clips were perfect for walking around Disney World!

These were inspired by the Minnie Mouse hair clips I found over at Pinkie For Pink.

DIY Minnie Mouse Ear Hair Clips

The materials list for this project is really simple!

• black felt
• pink polka dot ribbon
• hair clips of some sort (I used alligator clips)
• a hot glue gun
• scissors

Start by cutting out four circles from your piece of black felt. The size of the circles is up to you, just make sure you have four of them!

Next cut a length of pink ribbon and tie a small bow in it. Again, the size of the bow is up to you, but you need two of them.

Now grab two hair clips and you’re ready to start assembling your “ears”!

First, glue two of your felt circles to each other so that you have an “ear” that is nice and thick and will stand up on its own. Do the same to make the other “ear”.

Then glue a bow onto each “ear”, near the bottom.

Then you need to glue the ear onto the hair clip. Depending on what style of hair clip you are using, this step will vary, but basically just run a half inch line of hot glue along the bottom edge of the felt circles and press it onto the top of your hair clip. Make sure not to glue the hair clip shut!

Let it dry for about 30 seconds, and you’re done! Now you have adorable hair clips that are perfect for a trip to Disney, whether you’re a kid or an adult!

Have you ever been to Disney World or Disneyland? Did you dress up and act like a kid? Cuz you should!

The post DIY Minnie Mouse Ear Hair Clips is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.

Now that it’s summer, our local farmer’s market has started back up again! I love visiting the market because it’s great fresh food and produce at pretty reasonable prices, and it’s in the school playground literally across the street from our front door! We always end up buying something, so I decided we needed a reusable tote bag to bring with us. That way, we avoid the plastic bags, and I get a cute bag to carry around!

The bag is the perfect size for taking to the market with us, and it turned out really cute! Plus, you know how I love fabric projects that don’t require a sewing machine.

DIY Graphic Canvas Tote Bag

If you want to make your own tote bag with heat transfer vinyl, here’s what you need:

• a plain canvas tote bag
• Silhouette heat transfer material (use code FUNCTIONAL to buy one get one free!)
• an iron
• a Cameo (or a Portrait, or scissors)

The first thing you need to do is design your graphic. I found a cute vintage farmer’s market logo and turned it into a cuttable design in Silhouette’s Studio software. If you like the graphic I used, you can download the cutting file here, or a PDF version if you want to cut it out by hand!

• Silhouette Studio cutting file
• PDF Template

The heat transfer material is on a clear plastic backing that helps hold your design together while you iron it down. When you iron, the heat transfer material is against your project and the clear plastic is on top, which means you need to cut out your design backwards so that any text ends up going in the right direction.

In the Studio software you can easily click on your design, click on the Rotate tool, and flip it mirror image. Once your image is flipped, put the material on your cutting mat with the clear plastic backing against the sticky part of the mat. Once the cutting is done, your text should be backwards like in the photo below. But don’t worry, it will come out right side up when you’re done!

Next, weed out all the extra pieces of material, leaving only the pieces you want to transfer to your bag on the clear plastic backing. Then flip the design over so the clear plastic is on the top, and place it where you want the design to transfer onto your bag. Now that I’ve flipped it over, the text is legible!

Place a cloth over the design and plastic backing and then press a heated iron FIRMLY into the design for about 45 seconds. The cloth is important to make sure you don’t melt the plastic backing. Your iron should be heated to whatever temperature is appropriate for the material you are transferring your design to.

It definitely feels a bit weird to just sit there with a hot iron on your project for almost a full minute without moving it around or anything (and do time yourself, 45 seconds is a LOT longer than you think!), but I promise that’s what you’re supposed to do! If you don’t leave the heat on long enough, or press down hard enough, the vinyl won’t stick to your project or come off the plastic backing. If you’re worried about it, start with 30 seconds and then check to see how it went, but I can tell you from experience that I needed about 55 seconds of heat over each section to make sure my design really stuck!

Once you’re done ironing, you should be able to pick up the cloth and gently peel the plastic backing away. The vinyl should remain on your project! If the backing is still stuck to the vinyl in places, just put the cloth back down and press the iron into that spot again.

If you’ve done the ironing correctly, the vinyl sticks really well to the project! It should be totally flexible, so it can conform to the shape of your bag without folding or bending weird. And now it’s been two weeks since I did this project, and the vinyl is still stuck on just as well as it was when I first made it!

We take the bag to our farmer’s market each week, and it’s perfect!

Plus, just in case something spills in the bag, the heat transfer material is washable! So as long as you start with a canvas bag that is washable, you can wash your project even after you’ve added the graphic. Just turn the bag (or shirt, or whatever you use the material on) inside out and wash and dry it on a gentle cycle!

And remember, there is a great promotion going on right now for Silhouette’s heat transfer material! All of their heat transfer materials are buy one get one free!!! That’s insane! You can mix and match any of their heat transfer products, including the heat transfer starter kit, the smooth material, the flocked material, and the printable material (as in, print your own design and just iron it right onto your project!!!)

Or if you’ve been thinking of getting a cutting machine, now is a great time because the discounts on these bundles are HUGE! Visit http://www.silhouetteamerica.com/heat anytime between now and June 15th, and use the code FUNCTIONAL at checkout to get any of the great deals you see below!

Disclosure:  This post contains affiliate links.  Any purchases you make through those links help me to keep this blog running! Silhouette’s affiliate program is what lets me offer you guys great giveaways and awesome discounts on their products!

The post DIY Heat Transfer Canvas Tote Bag is a post by Jessi Wohlwend and appeared first on Practically Functional.