We just recently returned from a 10 day trip to Walt Disney World. I wanted to get this post up now as it was still fresh on my mind, then I promise I will be turning my focus to fall decorating! Yay!! Actually, thanks to Hurricane Irma it turned into a 12 day trip! Being from the Midwest, that was the first time we have experienced a hurricane. Luckily by the time it hit Orlando, the storm had weakened and we even slept through the worst of it.
I cannot say enough good things about how Disney handled the whole situation! We never lost power, they made sure everyone had plenty of food and drinks and were very accommodating to the guests staying on property. There were visits to the resorts from different characters and the arcade at Pop Century had complimentary games for the majority of the two days that the parks were closed. Needless to say, our boys were in the arcade for almost two days straight! Mr. Wonderful and I may have also joined in the fun. 😉
As I have mentioned before, we love to do things before our trips to build up the excitement and fun for our vacation. Some of the other fun things we did for this trip were making floral wire Minnie ears, color coordinating our outfits and decorating a countdown to Disney mantel. We have never decorated our MagicBands before but we saw some online and wanted to try it. It was really easy and we got lots of compliments on our DIY decorated MagicBands!
Some of you may be asking, “What is a MagicBand?” A MagicBand is quite literally your “Key to the World” while you are at Walt Disney World. You can use it as your room key, to make purchases that are charged to your room, as your ticket into the park, to pay for your meals, to save Photopass pictures and to utilize your fastpasses that you have booked. They are the most ingenious things ever. I also like the idea that if a child gets lost, a cast member (Disney employee) can figure out who they are and get a hold of the parents by scanning the child’s band. I know…it seems a little big brotherish but I personally think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
When you book a Disney vacation, you automatically get a complimentary MagicBand sent to you for each member of your party. You are able to choose which color you want the band to be but if you want to personalize it past that you will have to pay for it. Disney sells MagicBands with designs on them but being the DIYers we are, we figured we can do it ourselves.
Here is a tip as far as picking your color goes…the current MagicBands have pucks in the middle where all of your information is stored in a RFID chip. These pucks are removable if you want to switch out colors with another member of your party. We did this on a couple of the bands. Make sure you order the right colors when doing this though so you don’t end up with the middle being the color you wanted the band to be. You will have to order for each member the color they want the middle puck to be.
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For this project you will need:
- MagicBands
- Cricut Explore Air and tools
- Vinyl
- Matte Acrylic Spray
- Small screwdriver (to exchange the middle pucks with another color)
- Sharpie marker
We were able to find many of the images we used online by simply searching for silhouettes of the characters. For instance, we just googled Tinkerbell silhouette and there were lots of images to choose from. Keep in mind that very detailed silhouettes may not cut out well on the Cricut since you are cutting such a small image. The size of the MagicBands are only 1” in width so the image that you cut out will be smaller than that!
After applying the vinyl cutouts, we used a hair dryer to heat up the vinyl a bit. This seemed to make the vinyl stick a little better and smoothed out some of the jagged edges from the Cricut. I am not sure why the cutouts had jagged edges, it may be time to change our blade.
The blue and orange Tron bands were done a little differently. Instead of sticking a vinyl cutout onto the band, we made a stencil and colored around it with a black Sharpie marker. Mr. Wonderful created some lines and circles in Photoshop and we cut them out first with contact paper trying to save the vinyl for other projects. Well as you can see on the blue Tron band, the sharpie marker bled underneath the contact paper, so the lines appear more thin and jagged.
So he tried vinyl on the other side and that worked much better. It gave a lot cleaner lines as seen on the orange Tron band.
We were not sure how the bands would hold up over our trip. So we decided to spray them with a matte acrylic spray to help hold everything down. This also gave the added bonus of turning our glossy vinyl to a matte look. We all thought the matte looked much better since the bands have a matte finish as well.
Go Big Red!! 🙂
After our trip
In case you are wondering, our MagicBands held up very well over the 10 day trip. The adults’ bands fared better than the kids. I believe this is because we did not touch them as much. The matte spray must have left a little residue on top of the vinyl because it started to look dirty as we went along. They never felt sticky to the touch though. Here are some pictures of what I mean.
Luckily, the dirtiness was easily washed off. The vinyl started coming up on some of the edges but I was very happy with how it did overall. We did not wear these bands to the water park so I can’t attest to how they would hold up when swimming. We had some undecorated bands we used from a previous reservation for that.
Hope this helps to give you some inspiration for decorating your MagicBands! Have a wonderful day!
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