Supplies:

1. Faux leather. The one I used was from Dollar Tree, but you can also buy it from Amazon and other stores.
2. Cricut maker or explorer air any model/version
3. Fine point blade
4. Purple strong grip mat
5. Optional: painters tape if mat is not new and sticky or if you are using a standard green mat instead of the purple strong grip mat.
6. Double sided tape
7. Glass cylinder
8. Real or fake candle
9. Optional: earing or necklace pieces if you want to turn extra cutouts into jewelry. You will also need a hole punch. You will also need needle nose pliers.
10. Optional: my black cat design, which you can get for free from my library or you can create your own design.
    1. My library

Steps:

1. Download my design or create your own design. Make sure you adjust the design to fit your glass container.
2. Use your cutting machine to cut design out of faux leather. I used the setting paper thin faux leather on normal pressure with the fine point blade. If your leather moves while your machine is cutting, then place tape around leather edges and/or use a stronger grip and new mat to help hold your leather in place.
3. Apply double sided tape (removable method) or a type of super glue (permanent method) to your leather wrap and apply it to your glass container.
4. If you would like to make the earrings, then use a hole puncher to make a small hole at the top of your extra cutout. Apply glue to back side and align second leather piece. Then use needle nose pliers to add a jump ring and the earing finding. Repeat this for the second earing. If you want to make them into a necklace, then create your hole at the top of the leather. Then add a jump ring and feed a necklace chain through it.

To make the design I first found a shape I liked. I actually ended up using two different shapes of cats in my design. Some places you can find your shapes is in Design space or on google. Once your designs are on your canvas in Cricut Design Space, you will also want to make a rectangle in the measurements of your vase. To get a rectangle go to the left side of the page and click shapes, then click on the square. I decided to not make my leather go the entire height of my vase. I made my leather wrap (the rectangle) 10.7 inches wide and 6 inches tall. You can change the size of your square by clicking the size boxes at the top of the page, and clicking the little lock symbol so it is open. This will allow you to change the height and width individually. If the lock symbol is closed, the height and width with change together to keep the shape dimensions the same.

I then made duplicates of my shapes by clicking on my shape and then right clicked and hit duplicate. To help with spacing your shapes you may want to have grids on your canvas. You can add or remove the grids by clicking on the upper right corner of your canvas. See the red circle in the photo below or my YouTube video.

Keep duplicating your shape till you have enough for the first row. Then select the entire first row and hit the align button at the top of the page, and click align vertically.  This will make sure all of your shapes are also aligned up and down. Once all of your shapes are spaced and aligned you can select the entire row again and hit duplicate. You now have your second row and they are already spaced exactly how you spaced your first row. I then (with them all selected) dragged my second row into place. I offset my second row from my first row. So, my first row I placed in the middle of my grid boxes, which meant my second row needed to go between the boxes (on the lines). Keep doing this till you have enough rows to fit nicely in your rectangle.

If your rectangle goes in front of your designs, then click on the rectangle and then click arrange (top of page), then send to back. I also changed the color of my rectangle to a light gray, so it was easier to see my black cats. To change the color select the rectangle and click the colored square to the right of operations (basic cut) drop down at the top of the page, and just click which color you would like to change your rectangle too.

Now move your rectangle over the design you made and position it to your liking. You can use the align tools at the top to help you position your rectangle, but I just moved my rectangle by hand. If there are pieces of your design that do not fit inside your rectangle, you can delete them or slice them to only keep the half that fits inside. To slice a piece in half you must first select the rectangle and the item to be cut in half. Make sure the other item being cut is positioned on the rectangle where you would like to cut it. With both the rectangle and the item selected, click the slice button in the bottom right side of the page. The slice tool will take a little bit of time to preform the function. So, just give it time. You will know it is done when your screen flashes. You can only use the slice function with two items selected at a time. So, you may need to repeat this step if you have several pieces that stick out from your rectangle.

I decided not to cut any of my pieces in half because I did not want the ends to open and not line up well when I wrap my leather around my vase. So, it just depends on what you would like to do. Do not forget to delete all the extra pieces you do not need (the pieces that do not fit inside your rectangle).  

The last thing to do is to select all of your cats or what ever shapes and thing you decided to use, and click weld. This will join all the cats together so they are one piece. Now that they are one piece, you can click on the rectangle and the cat shapes and hit slice. The cats will be cut out of your rectangle. You will need to delete all the extra cat shapes so you are just left with your rectangle which has a lot of cut out shapes (cats) from it.

Now that your design is ready to go hit the make it button in the upper right-hand corner. Select the type of mat you will be using, probably the 12 x 12. Place your leather upside down (back side facing up) on your purple strong grip mat. If your mat is not new or very sticky, then you will also need to tape around the edges of your leather to make sure it does not move when being cut. Make sure your tape does not go over the edges of your mat, or it might mess up your cut. You can also roll a brayer over your leather to help secure it to your mat. Lastly, you will want to switch the mirror button on (just under the picture of your mat on the left-hand side of the screen). I then selected the paper thin leather setting.

Before unloading the mat from your machine use a tool to peel a little section of your design up to insure it cut all the way through. If it did not cut all the way through hit the go button again and it is do another pass through the machine. If you unload the mat and then decide to cut the design again, it will be slightly off. So, you need to run the cut again if needed before you unload your mat.

Once you have your leather wrap cut, I flipped my mat over and slightly bend it to help encourage the leather to come off the mat without much pulling on the leather. If a small section of the leather did not cut, then you can use scissors to snip the small section free.

To apply the leather strip to my class vase I first cleaned my glass vase. I then applied double sided tape around the back of my leather wrap. I applied the tape on the back of my leather vs directly on my glass so I knew when my cutouts where and thus would not have any tape showing through these cutouts. I used tape to make this changeable for the different seasons. The tape residue washed off easily with a little water. If you want it to be more permanent, then you can use a strong glue like gorilla glue. I rolled my glass vase over my leather wrap to apply it evenly and pulled on the back/ends to make sure they were straight and tight.

Since I had a lot of cut leather cutout pieces I decided to make earrings out of them. I first punched a small hole in the tops of four of my leather cutouts. I used the first hole I made to help me line up the second hole. If you do not have a small pole puncher, then you could also use a Cricut tool. The leather is pretty thin that it is not too difficult to punch through.  

I then applied some gorilla glue on the back of one of my leather pieces, and put the back of another leather piece together. I made sure the holes for the earing findings lined up well and set the piece aside to dry. You could put a heavy object on top of the earing to help it hold as it dries, but it was not necessary, and my earrings seemed just fine without doing this.

Once the glue was dry, I used my needle nose pliers to open my jump ring (pull right to left) and feed it through my hole. I placed the earing finding through my jump ring as well before closing it. My YouTube video shows how to open and close jumps rings. So, please watch that for more details. For a necklace you will do the same thing, but instead feed the necklace chain through the jump ring instead of the earing finding.

If your leather cutouts are not symmetrical shapes (the same on the right side and left side) like the cat head, then you will need to mirror the shape and cut another one for the backing of the earing or necklace. I would need to do this if I wanted the nice backing on the full cat body shape, otherwise the tails would not line up right.

It is nice you can get two projects out of the one. You could also use these extra pieces to decorate a sign or other project you might be working on. You could also do this same technique to cut just out one shape or design instead of the repeating patter like I did.