Cricut Project Ideas: DIY Tiger Rug

28 February 2023

We’ve seen those gorgeous, bright Tibetan tiger rugs for the home, and we’ve also seen their price tags! Having your own tiger rug does not need to be expensive. Cut the costs and create a vinyl floor decal to give the appearance of a rug with your Cricut machine.

When you decide it’s time for a change the vinyl rug is also easy to remove with removable vinyl. We timed ourselves removing it with just a scraper tool and it took us 2 minutes and 5 seconds! It was super quick and easy.

Gather a few friends to help you and set aside an afternoon for this DIY project. It may take a few hours but the results are incredible and can add a bold personality to your home that will wow anyone visiting.

We’ve already gone ahead and sliced the tiger rug design on Cricut Design Space into sections so that the rug can be cut on the width of a Cricut Explore™ 3 or Cricut Maker™ 3 machine and then pieced together after cutting. The rug is sized at 30.65 inches wide x 42.72 inches high. You can see this project here.


Cricut DIY Tibetan Tiger Rug

You will need

At least one other person helping (two extra is the best for this!)

4 rolls of pink Smart Vinyl™

4 rolls of maize Smart Vinyl™

4 rolls of black Smart Vinyl™

1 roll of white Smart Vinyl™

1 roll of red Smart Vinyl™

Cricut Explore™ 3 or Cricut Maker™ 3 Machine

Weeding Tool

Scraper Tool (We recommend the Cricut XL Scraper)

Cricut Transfer Tape

Tibetan Tiger Design Space project

How to make

First, open up the project in Design Space and get cutting! There is a lot to cut out so this may take some time.


Cricut Design Space and cutting materials

Begin weeding each roll. You might see you have lots of free vinyl on the roll that wasn’t used for cutting out your tiger. Cut these parts off and place them in a scrap bag to use these materials for another day.

Once you are left with your vinyl pieces on the vinyl backing it’s time to start transferring them.

We started with the piece that includes the tail. Use transfer tape and a scraper tool to transfer your piece onto the floor. You can use transfer tape multiple times and if the piece is big enough, you could use the same piece for all vinyl sections of this rug.

Place the tailpiece down on the floor and pull the transfer tape back to reveal your first secure tiger piece. Use the scraper tool during the transferring of the vinyl onto the tape and then transfer this onto the floor to help remove air bubbles and any creases.

Continue with the pink layer piecing together the outlines and the inner lines so that they fit together like a jigsaw. Then work on the orange pieces. Have the Design Space screen up for you to refer to how each piece fits together.


Using vinyl to create a tiger floor decal

Next, we added the black vinyl layers to the tiger. At this point, you can add the red and white pieces to the black layers before transferring or you can add them on afterwards.

The process is the same except this time, we started with the face layer and then pieced the rest of the black layers from this point.


Cricut Project idea: Tibetan tiger rug made with vinyl

This took us around 2 hours to assemble but once we got the hang of the repeated process using the transfer tape and matching up the pieces, we became much quicker and more confident with placing the pieces down onto the floor.


DIY tibetan tiger rug

Stand back and admire your tiger. The great thing about using transfer tape and scraper tools is that it means the vinyl is nice and flat and well stuck down which is needed when you are creating floor decals. We used removable vinyl so that you can take it up any time you would like.


Colourful Cricut Home Decor Project Ideas

Bold Home Decor

Want to see more of our bold home decor ideas? See our blog for all about it.

Share your makes with us

We cannot wait to see what you create! Make sure to share with us on social media by tagging @cricut_uk on Instagram and TikTok.

Share with our community on Design Space by publishing your project live. Find out how to publish and share projects in Design Space here.