The Little Weeding Hook That Rescued a Church Decal Order

Twelve doors. That was the number the church office gave me in August, twelve classroom doors that needed new labels before the fall term started. Each one was a room name or a room number, and the letters were about half an inch high. I had been cutting vinyl since March by then, five months of decals and a few shirts for people at church, and I had never made anything that small. I did those twelve labels with a three piece tiptopcarbon weeding set that had been sitting in a mug beside my cutter since the spring.

Small letters are a different job from big ones. A name at two inches is forgiving. If a corner lifts, you press it back down and nobody is the wiser. At half an inch, every letter has a counter, that little island of vinyl inside an O or an A or a P, and the island has to come out without taking the letter with it. You cannot do it with a fingernail. I sat down at the folding table in the spare bedroom on a Saturday morning, pulled the desk lamp close, put my reading glasses on, and stayed there until all twelve were finished.

The tiptopcarbon set was not something I researched. It came in the same March order as the Cricut Joy Xtra, the black Sooez roll and the YRYM HT transfer tape, and I opened it the first evening. Three pieces: a hook, a pair of tweezers and a loop. Until that Saturday I had mostly used the hook and left the rest in the mug.

The hook is the workhorse. You slide the point under a corner of the waste vinyl, lift, and move on to the next piece. The tweezers handle the scraps too small to pinch, the bits the size of a comma that you would otherwise chase around the mat with a finger.

The loop is the piece I had not understood until I needed it. Vinyl clings to its backing sheet, and when you pull a counter out of the middle of an O, the letter around it wants to come up too. On a two inch decal you can put a fingertip on the letter and hold it down. At half an inch your fingertip covers the whole letter and then some. So you press the letter flat with the loop and lift the scrap with the hook, and the letter stays exactly where it belongs. The listing says the loop holds down the smaller pieces that tend to lift up while weeding. That is a plain description of the job.

Twelve labels, letters half an inch high, three hours on a Saturday morning, and not one of them tore.

The whole morning took about three hours, including two breaks to stand up and stretch my back. That is not fast by anybody's standards and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What mattered was that nothing tore. Twelve labels went onto the backing sheet finished, and I carried them to church in an envelope on Sunday and handed them over.

I should tell you how I got to that Saturday. In March, the first decal I ever cut was a small name for Glen's toolbox. On the first try one letter tore, because I was weeding it with a straight pin out of my sewing box, because I did not know any better. I cut the piece again, opened the tiptopcarbon set, and used the hook instead. It came up clean in about a minute. I have not touched the pin since.

What the set is not: it is small, the tips are sharp, and it does not come with a case. I keep mine in a coffee mug beside the cutter, which works fine and means the tools are already out when I sit down. If there are small children in the house, put them higher than a mug. The tweezers in particular will find the one spot on the mat you did not want pinched. It has more than six thousand reviews and a 4.8 average, which I did not look at until well after I had bought it.

The other thing I would say is that a tool set does not make you careful. I still check every letter before I lay the transfer tape down, and I still flatten curled pieces of vinyl under a book overnight. The tools just mean that when I do sit down, the fussy part of the evening takes minutes instead of taking the whole evening.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you that the vinyl cutter gets all the attention and the small tools get none, and for anyone working at a folding table with a lamp, that is backwards. The machine makes the cut in a couple of minutes. The weeding is the part where you either enjoy your evening or lose a letter. I would tell you to buy the three piece set along with the machine rather than after the first tear, because the first tear is coming, and it is not a character building moment, it is just a small nuisance. And I would tell you not to expect the hook in the tiptopcarbon set to do anything clever. It is a hook, a pair of tweezers and a loop. The hook is the reason you will reach for it every single time.