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SearchDIY Cricut Birthday Cake Topper
In this craft tutorial, we are going to show you how to make an adorable Cricut cake topper. This isn’t just any birthday cake topper though. This has a shaker element to it and it’s filled with glitter!
This may look complicated, but it’s a simple Cricut beginner project, especially once you see all of our crafting tips and tricks. Our step-by-step craft tutorial will walk you through it so that with the help of your Cricut machine, you can make one of these beautiful paper cake toppers too. Paper crafters and party planners, you’re going to want to see this!
DIY Cricut Birthday Cake Topper
Cricut cake topper materials needed:
- Cricut machine like a Cricut Explore 3 or Cricut Maker 3
- Lynn Lilly Hot Glue Gun
- Scotch ATG Gun
- Zig glue pen
- Our Favorite Cutting Mats
- Scissors
- Cardstock
- Foam tape
- Spoon
- Skinny dowels
- Clear protective sheet from an old Cricut cutting mat (you could use some other clear plastic or acetate sheet if you don’t have one of these but this is a great tip for recycling!)
- Mermaid Santa Suit cut file
- Jingle Shells cut file
- Fishy Wishy font
Step-by-Step Tutorial – How to make a Cricut birthday cake topper:
Working in Cricut Design Space:
1 – Upload the Santa mermaid cut file and the Jingle Shells cut file into Cricut Design Space. We’re going to tweak these files so we can use them just as we’d like.
2 – Select the mermaid file. Over in the layers panel, delete the white and black layers by clicking Hide on each of them. (The eye shaped icon)
3 – Select the mermaid file again. To delete the hat, we’re going to use Contour.
4 – Now, to get the shell you want to use, simply cover it with shapes from the Shapes menu on the left sidebar. Select both shapes and Weld.
PRO TIP: You can only slice through two layers. So, we welded the two shapes together to make them one layer.
5 – Next, you can select the main Jingle Shells file with the shells in it and the welded shapes. Choose Slice. Discard everything except for the shell for your design.
Customizing your design as desired:
6 – Open a textbox and type in the number for the birthday. We used the Fishy Wishy font for this to have i work well with the mermaid theme.
7 – Arrange your design elements as you’d like and size them accordingly.
Cleaning up your design:
8 – Sometimes, a design can start looking too busy or “messy” with several layers placed on top of each other. To help separate some of the elements and make it look a little cleaner, you can use the Offset tool. Move the slider to adjust the size of the offset.
9 – You might want to change the colors of your cake topper design to mimic those of your final craft project. This will help you visualize it better. The colors don’t need to match your materials perfectly. This is just to give you an idea of what it will look like.
PRO TIP – This will also help remind you of which materials you’ll need to place on your cutting mat.
Simplify your design:
10 – Select both layers of the number and Duplicate. As it stands now, there would be a lot of tiny pieces of cardstock cut out from the scales portion of the number and these would be quite tedious and intricate to try to place properly. So, we have a Cricut hack for that!
To fix this issue, choose both layers of your duplicated layer and select Slice. When you start moving away the slice results, you’ll see that you’re left with this layer in the center. In this one, the scales are attached to the outline/offset and this will be much easier to place on your design!
Now you have a layer that has the scales and the offset that can easily be glued on top of the base layer for the number.
Using contour:
11 – Select the tail and shell layers and add an offset to them as well. Then, with that selected, choose Contour. Select Hide All Contours.
This will make the offset a solid shape.
12 – To further refine and simplify the design, select the shell shape and go to Contour. Contour out the little accent pieces.
13 – Duplicate the seashell outline layer so that you can use it to make the shaker part of the cake topper.
14 – With that duplicated layer selected, choose Contour. Click Hide All Contours.
Now you have a solid shell shape that will be cut out of the clear plastic to form the shaker section of the cake topper.
Cutting out your design:
15 – With the whole design selected, size it however you’d like. We think that 6 inches high is a great size for a cake topper.
16 – Click Make It to cut out all of your layers. Remember to select the appropriate materials for each layer.
Assembling your cake topper:
17 – Begin assembling the cake topper. Glue the shell outline on top of the clear plastic shell piece and the number 6 outline with the scales on top of the plain number 6 background. Glue the mermaid tail to the background.
18 – Use foam tape to apply the top layer of the seashell (the one that’s glued to the clear plastic) to the base.
Adding the final details:
19 – Add glitter. Remove the backing strips on the foam tape. Attach the background piece to the clear shell shaker piece.
20 – Adhere the number to the front of the cake topper. Glue the dowels on the back.
You can find more cake topper ideas here:
