I am probably an “extra” type of person – I like to do things a bit differently, and usually outside the box. When I do something, I like to do it all the way – including extras that make a big difference and is the final touch for your presentation. Why give an embroidered gift when you can give an embroidered gift with a matching card – and get a lot of WOWs!!

I call this idea, “OML Crafty Extras” – a few extra things you can do to really spiff up your gift presentation. I use my cutter to make these crafty extras. I know not everyone is interested in using the cutters, but more and more people have them for pre-cutting fabric for their applique designs – so why not take it a bit further and create something for your embroidery?

For this crafty extra, I used a piece of plain cardstock, a glitter gel pen and my Cricut Maker! That’s it! It really took 5 minutes to put together and a few more to draw and cut it out. The key to this embroidery gift project is that the design in the card matches the embroidery design. Talk about classy!

The first thing you need to do is open up your embroidery design in your embroidery software. For this project, I used Wilcom E4, my top software. I brought in the embroidery design – a monogram from Shuler Studio that’s gorgeous – and I made a few changes. I didn’t worry about the size, but I did change the motif stitches on one of the letters for a better drawing result. I made the motif stitches simple and clear so that they would draw better.

The next thing you need to do – and you can do it in most embroidery software is to save the embroidery design as an image. In Wilcom E4 you can export the embroidery design in quite a few ways – but exporting the bitmap into a PNG seemed to pick up the detail.

PRO TIP: if you don’t have embroidery software that will allow you to export images of the embroidery, you can always take a screenshot on your computer with free software that comes with Windows 10.

Open up your cutter software and import the image to trace. Depending on your cutter software, there are many ways to do this. In Cricut design space, you import the image, tell Cricut what type of image it is (this one is simple and clean) and then you can make adjustments and save it as a drawing file. bring that into your software mat, and you are good to go! Change the cut to draw, making it the size that you want. You can hop on to the Cricut site to grab a simple card to put around the design – you can change colors and add more designs or a special lettering message if you wish – just to make it even more unique, and then load and send it to your Cricut maker. Draw, score and cut your card out!

That’s pretty much all that you do! Once you do it a few times, it will get faster and easier to set up. Plus, you can be more and more creative with this extra project. Pick paper that matches your design or gift, pick different pen colors and different card shapes. No one says that a card has to be square, right?

Make yourself stand out from the crowd and do a little extra for your machine embroidery – you will love the reactions to being just a little extra crafty!!