When my daughter got her Cricut machine a few years ago, she had a pretty distinct purpose to fulfill with it, but as time went by, she learned more and more about the other things she could do with it as well. There are so many things you can do with vinyl. I wouldn't be surprised if sometime soon we could start cutting our own records using the thing and become a world famous band...oh, wait, people don't do bands anymore. It's just idiots with no talent singing like they're the winner of the voice and then processing the hell out of their music until it sounds nothing like themselves to make it listenable. Maybe not.
Anyway, one of the things my daughter discovered is that you can make window stickers using her machine. She wanted to try it out, so she asked me if there was something I'd want to put on my window. Maybe a Minnesota Vikings sticker?
I guess I could try that, so I sent her a logo and she made me a sticker. It looked amazing, exactly like a sticker I'd pay handsomely at a sports store to be able to own. I stuck it on my truck and started driving around with it. My daughter made a few more stickers for my wife and for my other daughter, ones that she'd even designed herself. Soon, we all had a sticker on our cars that she'd created.
Unfortunately, the stickers didn't handle the weather very well. They were printed off a computer, and the color began fading out pretty quickly. It only took a few weeks for my Vikings logo to become a plain white sticker in the outline of a Vikings logo. That happened to all the other stickers she'd created as well. We had to peel them off and call the experiment a failure.
Fast forward to very recently, when I decided to turn my truck into one of those trucks that is covered with window stickers. I talked about how I'd become one of those people in a blog post a week ago if you want to know the whole story there. After taking that leap, but being thwarted by the proliferation of oddly oversized window stickers on Temu, I started thinking of other inexpensive ways to go about it.
I noticed that somebody I work with has a sticker for Yosemite National Park on their Jeep that was just a one color thing. It was a white sticker, and the rest was negative space, that became the black of the tinted window. It looked pretty good, and I wondered if my daughter could do something like that. After all, she'd already made me several national park shirts using designs we'd found on the internet that were just like this—one color designs using the color of the shirt as the accent color. She could probably use one of those pre-made designs and print a sticker out.
She sure could, and in no time, I had a new sticker.
It might have been better had it been in a light green, but we didn't have that color of vinyl. This sticker cost us absolutely nothing to make, so it was an upgrade from the ones that I'd paid for last time and then discovered they were just way too big.
Asking my daughter to do this for me, however, got her mind going. Ever since the original failure of the Vikings sticker, she'd been brooding ever so slightly. She didn't like to lose. There had to be a way to make it work. She'd heard that if you laminated the stickers, then the colors wouldn't run off, and when I asked her to make a window sticker for me, she was motivated to give it a try. She ordered some laminate sheets from Amazon...which negated the whole we-didn't-pay-anything-for-the-Everglades-sticker thing. It led us to blow money elsewhere, so we paid in the end.
My daughter told me she going to try the laminate stickers now, and this got me thinking about what kind of sticker I could have her make for me. I sat down and messed around with stuff I could find on the internet, combining things until I came up with this design for a Muir Woods sticker, a place that I've visited several times over the years, but most recently back in 2018.
I was still in the one-color vinyl line of thinking though. I wanted to make something that we could print out that way if we had to. My daughter had moved on. She wasn't going to make a simple one color design. She asked me if I liked this new version of my design she'd done for me with a gradient that made the trees more tree like.
I had to admit that it looked pretty darn good. She printed the sticker, did the lamination thing, and that night, I had a new window sticker waiting for me on my keyboard. I put it on my truck the next morning, and here's how it turned out:
I have to say, as a creative person, that there's nothing better than seeing your own ideas go from an inspiration to a physical manifestation like they can in this modern day and age. That goes for stickers like this to my stories and novels too. It's just so amazing what we can do now.
Of course, you can expect me to go overboard, and have my whole window filled with stickers in no time. If I can make my own, then of course I will. I think I'll start by having her make some of those stickers that I got from Temu in sizes that are way too big. We'll remake those in sizes that are more appropriate.
From there, the sky's the limit...
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