DIY Coffee Ornaments are SO Easy

What to Know about Coffee Beans

While these are extremely rare to encounter, it's worth noting that you should not use unroasted coffee beans in your coffee Christmas ornaments. Coffee beans are roasted at 500 degrees, which kills any potential germs that could cause mold to develop later. When roasted, these will last in an ornament indefinitely (although probably wouldn't be the quality you'd want to brew coffee from after a year or so).

Looking for more coffee stuff?

• Make the best black coffee
• Cold brew coffee is easy and delicious
• These gifts for coffee drinkers are always a hit
• Everyone loves our coffee cupcakes
• Coffee beef? Yup, it's a thing

What to Know about the Cricut Joy

We've had a lot of readers try making various stickers with kits and printables, but most wind up wanting to buy the Cricut Joy once they see how easy it is to use. It's the least expensive and most portable machine that Cricut currently makes, which means it's the perfect way to dabble in easy crafting. Especially when you consider the cost of buying separate gifts for everyone on your list (compared to investing in a machine now to make handmade gifts for people for years to come!) it's a no-brainer. We absolutely love our Cricut Joy. Here are more projects we've made with ours:

• DIY Wallpaper
• The start of my own little Cricut Business
• A Cricut Hat for parties
• Tea towels for a Cricut Christmas

Tips for Perfecting your Christmas Ornaments

One of the most important things about crafting at home is to create a clear, clean space. This is especially important with see-through projects like our coffee ornaments. Nobody wants to see any dust or grime in their handmade items! Clean your space well with some clean-up wipes or a sponge and cleaning solution. I go as far as vacuuming and using a cat hair roller, since we have so many animals around. This is my routine with all Cricut projects, and it's extra important for iron-on or infusibles, where you don't get a second chance!

I used permanent vinyl for maximum durability of my coffee ornaments, and if you mess up in transferring it can sometimes smudge a little bit. If that happens, don't stress, just use some rubbing alcohol and a Q-tip to remove additional residue. If you're a beginner crafter or it's your first time with a Cricut machine, removable vinyl is a safe bet while you learn how placement works.

Placement is actually very easy, especially with small projects like those you'll be making with the Cricut Joy. The dimensions of our vinyl transfer in this case are less than two inches in either direction, which is a perfect beginner project! It helps to have a quality weeder (it's basically like a little pointy tip, or even tweezers will work in a pinch). This is what you'll use to pull the excess vinyl away from your cut for a perfectly-adorable expression.

Once you have the excess vinyl pulled away from your design, simply cut down transfer tape to the size of your design, press onto the vinyl, lift gently while watching to make sure every edge is pulling up nicely, then press onto your coffee ornament and pull the transfer tape away. Voila! You now have a handmade ornament that looks totally professional and would make the perfect gift for anyone on your list!

I actually have a lot of readers email me to say that they didn't know about transfer paper when they got into vinyl designs, and were attempting to pick up the individual little pieces of vinyl and perfectly place them on their final design. I can't even imagine that painstaking work! Trust me: get transfer tape. Your life will be so much easier. Make sure to get the regular transfer tape for regular vinyl, and not StrongGrip (which is typically reserved for heavyweight vinyl like the kind with glitter).

Speaking of simplicity, I love that the Cricut Joy uses Smart Vinyl with a strong backing that can be fed straight into the machine. No mats required! That alone saves me tons of time. I do have mats in all sorts of varieties for more complicated projects such as when I'm sewing or making large signs. Easy stuff like these ornaments, though? Smart Vinyl saves me tons of time and energy.