Everybody Goes a Little Batty!

Everyone needs some bats!

Particularly if you have a steel garage door!

This project is how to make a swarm or cloud of bats - sometimes also known as a Cauldron (my favorite) of swirling bats for decoration.

These bats are cut out of thin magnetic sheet that will magnetically attach to a steel garage door as part of your Halloween decorations.

1. 8 inches x 10 feet Non-adhesive magnetic sheets, 30 mil (0.6mm) thick for crafts on Amazon
2. Bat image files - I purchased mine from CraftyBels on Etsy.

I created 4 different sheets of bats (~8 x 23") in Cricut Design Space of varying sizes out of the 11 bat images I downloaded. I did not attach the bat files with this Instructable as the images may be copyrighted and the price is ridiculously inexpensive to purchase bat graphic files to your liking.

The magnetic sheet is actually 7-7/8 inch wide so plan accordingly. I used the 24 inch mat for my Cricut Maker. I made 41 bats ranging in wingspan from about 2 inches to about 16-1/2 inches.

Each of the 4 collections of bats took about 15 minutes to cut out on the Cricut Maker. I had to make some practice cuts and determine the Maker settings by trial and error.

There is 0.6mm magnetic material in Cricut's material list but I did not have the suggested Deep-Point Blade for the job. There was 0.5mm magnetic material listed that suggested using the standard Fine-Point Blade so I modified its settings under custom materials to 350 pressure and to make 8 passes, along with adjusting the force under the Pressure Setting to "More" just before the cut.

Using these settings was still not enough to cut completely through the magnetic sheet, but it was possible to easily tear the bats out along the cut lines.

Carefully tear the bats out of the magnetic sheet along the cut lines. The maker almost cut them completely out but not quite. Using a Deep-point Blade and the proper settings would probably do the trick but I only had the Fine-point Blade.

Place your bats as you like. I wanted the swarm to come as if it was from a distance so I ordered the bats from large to small. You can print all large bats, all small bats, or vary size from large to small as I did depending on how you want to portray the bats.

Have fun going Batty and Enjoy!