Growing up as an athlete, I love supporting young athletes. I’m really excited to assistant coach baseball this summer. Both of my boys are playing baseball this year, it’ll be plenty busy. With each player needing their own helmet, these helmets need to be numbered to avoid any confusion. Since I like to play around and make things, I made custom helmet stickers.
Supplies:
- white removable vinyl (so you can take the number off later on)
- Cricut cutting machine
- and a baseball helmet
Creating Your Design
Using a sports-style font for the numbers, in design layout on my Cricut I made the numbers big and bold. I squished (for those designers out there, read: kerned) my numbers closer together. This allowed me more of a canvas/space to create my design. If the numbers are too far apart, you lose the shape and design. Then I layered in the lightning bolt. It took a bit of finessing to determine the best placement for the lightning bolt. The 86 & 36 both work very well to center the lightning bolt in between the numbers. Then I used the Combine tool to apply “exclude” which creates the cut-outs between the lightning bolt and numbers. Honestly, I can never remember which Combine functions do what, or sometimes I don’t even know what effect I want. Typically I play around with the Combine functions until I find the effect I’m looking for.
In creating these custom helmet stickers, other number combinations were a bit more dynamic. These required me to play around with shape, size, and placement of the lightning bolt a little more. The idea is to have fun and try various things with the design. In a project like this, it isn’t a one-size fits all approach.
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