Bees are the heart of spring and summer. To me when I see Bees, I know that flowers are close by and honey is being made. They bring joy and are pretty cute too! I wanted to add some of that fun joy to my own house and thought I would share my first DIY Infusible Ink Bee Coaster tutorial with you!
Disclosure: I am a Cricut Ambassador. Affiliate links are included in this post. All opinions are my own.
Inspiration for Bee Coasters
Last year, I was perusing the dollar spot at Target and they had some fun Bee inspired decor that I just felt was perfect for my kitchen. I change out my decorative decor about once a month, as the holidays and seasons change, so the bees would be perfect for the space between spring and summer decor.
I also just recently did a whole deep refinishing of the table top to fill in scratches, get rid of heat and water stains and wax the top of our beautiful table. Coasters seemed like a really great addition to our table settings and so I decided to get a little creative and make a set that I knew would look adorable in our little bee kitchen space.
How to Design Coasters in Design Space
I had a bit of trouble creating this design. Actually the design itself was pretty easy, but making it work cohesively was a learning experience, so I wanted to share a quick walk through of how to do this. First create your actual designs. I found some bees, a hive, honeycomb and a font that I really liked and then put together 4 coaster designs that I felt would look really good together and grouped them. You can grab my design here.
From there I created 4 circles that were 3.5” in diameter and placed those behind the grouped designs. I then hit attach. It is important to note that you need to have your designs set as “draw” not cut and that you use infusible ink pens to draw them out. When you go to make the design, yours should like like what you see below.
Supplies Needed to Make the Coasters
This project is somewhat supply heavy, but worth it and nearly everything is reusable so just get your hands on these items and get to work. I took a photo of some of them, but I will put a list below for you to check off as you work.
- Cricut Design Space Bee Coaster Design
- Cricut Explore Air 2, Maker or Joy will all work.
- Cricut Infusible Ink Pens AND Markers
- Cricut Infusible Ink Round Coaster Blanks
- Cricut Heat Resitant Tape
- Laser Copy Paper
- Cricut EasyPress
- Butcher paper
- Cardstock
Bee Coaster Creation Walk Through
After you have the design set up in Design Space, then send it to make. On a light grip mat, place your sheet of copy paper and select that as your printing surface. Make sure your design is MIRRORED! Then load in the pen color as instructed into the pen holder.
Follow the directions on screen to switch pens as you work. I chose to use the butterscotch and black pen colors for my design, but if I were to make these again, I would probably choose a darker color orange/yellow for those sections of the coaster designs.
Once the Cricut machine finishes drawing and cutting out the coaster circles you can either, transfer them directly to the coasters following the process below or you can use the infusible ink markers to color in the spaces you would like to have filled in. You do need to do this by hand, but it actually goes very quickly.
Next, set up your Cricut EasyPress to 400ºF (205º C) for 4 minutes to warm up. While the press is warming up, set up your EasyPress mat, lay the butcher paper on it, place your coasters face up on the mat (wipe them down with a lint free cloth) and then using heat resistant tape, adhere your designs to the coasters. You should be able to see through them so that they are laid ink side down, but are readable through the paper on the coaster as you see above.
Once the EasyPress is set up, lay a piece of cardstock over your coasters and then apply the EasyPress with medium pressure for a total of 4 minutes. Depending on the size of your EasyPress, you should be able to be press all of them at the same time.
When the timer goes off, remove the EasyPress and allow your coasters to cool for 2 minutes before removing the paper transfer from the coaster. Notice that the color from the transfer is a much different color then what actually transfers over. Keep that in mind that things will be much more vibrant than they appear on the paper.
DIY Infusible Ink Bee Coaster
Boom, Done! Look how adorable these are! Not bad for my first Infusible Ink project. They look so adorable on my kitchen table and the kids are actually using them and not putting their ice cold drinks on my beautiful table! I totally want to make more for each of the holidays and seasons now.
