Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About Cricut Machines

Are you itching to get crafting? Want to explore the possibilities of Cricut? Start here!

When I first discovered Cricut, I knew I had to own one of these incredible machines. It took a while, but I finally got my Cricut machine! It is every bit as amazing as I expected.

Here’s what Cricut is all about:
First, What Is A Cricut and What Does It Do?

There are three Cricut machines: Explore, Maker, and Joy. The Joy is a compact machine meant for small projects and is designed to cut a range of materials from paper and cardstock to vinyl and thin faux leather, as well as draw and write. The Explore and Maker are larger, and both cut and write on even more materials, as well as scoring and foiling (the Explore and Maker), and engraving, debossing, perforating and more (only the Maker).

The crafting opportunities with these machines are endless. Sticking to just paper and cardstock, you can make personalized cards, invitations, place cards, boxes, centerpieces, models, tags, and lots more. The world of vinyl opens up even more possibilities – personalized labels, wall decals, mugs, hydroflasks, coasters, t-shirts, caps, hoodies, etc. 

What It Comes With, and Essentials You’ll Want To Buy

In the Cricut Joy box you’ll find the machine, a 4.5″ x 6.5″ green standard-grip cutting mat, a black fine-point pen, a start-up guide, and a sample piece of both cardstock and vinyl to get to work on your first project. The other machines come with similar materials to start you off. You’ll want to follow the instructions to download Cricut Design Space on your PC or phone (As much as the phone app makes it on-the-go and convenient, I highly recommend the desktop version, as it is so much easier to design projects, especially larger ones, on a larger screen. Also, some features are only available on desktops). Design Space is where you’ll be creating your projects and sending them to your machine (via Bluetooth connection) to create! More on that soon.

While you can definitely start creating right away with just the materials in the box (assuming you have some cardstock lying around), there are several tools and materials you’ll probably want to get in addition.

Tools

• Weeder tool Once your machine has cut your material, you’ll need to weed away the excess to get your design, which can be especially tricky with vinyl, which is sticky. This tool makes it a lot easier.
• Scraper To transfer vinyl well, you need one of these to adhere it to the transfer tape (you can use a credit card or similar, but I find this works slightly better). It also comes in an XL size.
• Mats Most of your projects will need mats. They have a sticky surface to which you adhere your material, and then you feed the mat into the machine for it to cut, unloading your material afterward. While the standard grip mat works with a large variety of materials, you’ll probably want a blue light grip mat for thinner materials like paper and lighter-weight cardstock (or the purple strong-grip mat for heavier materials), as well as getting the longer mats for longer cuts. Having a few mats also saves time when making a project that requires cutting several different materials; you can prepare your mats in advance instead of having to unload and reload the same one each time. The Cricut Joy also has a special card mat, designed specifically for making your own cards, and the Maker also has a special fabric mat for cutting fabric. Cricut’s own mats can be expensive, so I recommend a pack like this for the regular mats, they work just as well, and you get a lot more for your money.
• Paper trimmer: This comes in very handy for the Joy in particular, where you can’t just take a full piece of printer paper or cardstock and stick it into the machine, since the widest it can take is 4.5″. You’ll need to cut all your materials down to size to fit. It also comes in handy with the bigger machines.
• Adhesives If you plan on doing lots of paper crafting, you’ll want appropriate glue, a needle-tip applicator for precise gluing, and/or a fine-tip hot glue gun.
• Brayer This rolling tool is really useful for making sure your material is well-adhered to your mat before loading to avoid it moving around during a cut. It’s particularly useful for the larger machines and for fabrics.

Many of the tools are available off-brand for cheaper or can be purchased in bundles instead of individually.

Materials

Of course it depends what your main use of your machine will be, but these are materials you’ll want to stock up on:

• Cardstock All colors, textures and patterns. You can buy specific colors and scrapbook patterns for specific projects, but you’ll probably want a basic variety of colors on hand for random everyday projects.
• Vinyl There are three types of vinyl: removable, permanent and iron-on or HTV (heat transfer vinyl). You can buy vinyl in long rolls of a single color, or individual sheets.
  Removable vinyl is great for labels and wall decals – things you may want to move around, change or just not hang around forever. It removes from most surfaces without leaving residue. Again, the Cricut brand products are usually the most expensive. A leading brand out there for well-priced vinyl is Oracal; their removable vinyl is called Oracal 631 and comes in a large variety of colors. I find that the backing of Oracal vinyl is thinner than Cricut’s, so you’ll want to set the pressure setting to “less” when cutting to avoid cutting through the backing. Another fantastic option is Starcraft SD from 143vinyl.com – it’s only $2.85 for a 5ft roll when it’s not on sale!
  Permanent vinyl is for personalizing things that you want to last (it can come off with a bit of elbow grease, but unless you specifically try, it can go on things like bottles which need to be washed, cars etc, without coming off). Oracal’s permanent vinyl is called Oracal 651, while Starcraft’s is Starcraft HD (my go-to vinyl).
  HTV is for personalizing fabrics – t shirts, shoes, caps, all sorts! It can also be used on wood, ceramics, cardstock etc, just be careful not to use it on plastics or acrylics which can melt under heat – like its name suggests, this vinyl is applied through heat. For a cheaper off-brand product, I like Starcraft Softflex and Siser Easyweed, both available for great prices on 143vinyl.com.

For all of these, Cricut also makes what they call Smart Materials, which are materials that can be fed into your machine without a mat, thereby enabling longer cuts. (Up until June 10th, this was available only for the Joy, but they’ve since unveiled the Cricut Explore Air 3 and Cricut Maker 3, for both of which the main upgrade from the previous models is the addition of this Smart Materials feature). All three types of vinyl can be bought in solid colours, glitter, holographic and all sorts of patterns.

• Infusible Ink is applied similarly to HTV, the difference being that it uses sublimation technology to absorb into the fabric that it is being applied to, instead of remaining an ironed-on layer on top. It only works with fabrics that are mainly polyester, or special polyester-coated non-fabrics, like Cricut mugs and coasters. Infusible ink is available in solid colours and many fun patterns and designs.

Infusible Ink pens do the same thing, but to apply these you have your Cricut draw or write your design with the pens on regular paper, and then apply that with heat to your item.

• Transfer Tape In order to apply vinyl to a project, you’ll need transfer tape.
• Adhesive Cardstock Cricut makes a variety of patterned cardstock with adhesive backing, making it great for stickers and labels, or glue-free paper crafts.
• Smart Label Writable Vinyl Great for labels and stickers, your Cricut can write on this and then cut! Comes in white and craft paper.
• Card packs Cricut makes a variety of card packs that come with decorative inserts, for use with the Cricut Joy Card Mat.
• Pens Cricut makes a large variety of pens and markers for its larger machines, and there is a smaller but decent selection for the Joy as well. These include extra-fine tip, fine-tip, markers, glitter pens, gel pens etc. While the regular Cricut Pens do not fit in the Joy, there are many Etsy sellers (and several on Amazon) who sell a small plastic adapter piece that fits into the Joy and enables the regular pens to be used, giving a wider variety of Joy-compatible pens. Similarly, to avoid spending too much on Cricut-specific pens for the larger machines (or the Joy), these sellers have sets of adapters that allow all sorts of regular pens and markers to be used in the machines, from Sharpies to Tombows and all sorts of other ones. These adapters are usually inexpensive and can enable you to use pens and markers that you already have at home.

Extra Tools

• Scoring Stylus This handy tool is great for 3d paper crafts, favor boxes, etc. Designed for the Explore and Maker, it slots into the pen slot of the machine, and when you set a line in Design Space to the “score” setting, it scores the line for you, so when you unload your paper you have an easy time folding. To use it with the Joy, you’ll need another one of the handy adapters from Etsy. Also, since the Joy doesn’t officially have a “score” setting, you’ll want to set the score lines to “draw” (best to layer two or three draw lines on top of each other for a deep enough score) and set the pen colour to a different colour than any actual drawing or writing in your project, so that the machine will prompt you to switch it out.
• Foiling Tool Set This makes for a beautiful addition to cards, invitations and so much more! Again, it was designed for the Explore and Maker, so you’ll want an adapter set to use it with a Joy. (As of June 18th, Cricut has a foiling tool set designed specifically for the Joy, so the adapter set won’t be necessary unless you have two machines and don’t want to buy two foiling sets).
• Cricut Maker Tools There are currently about 13 different tools available for use with the Maker, including a deep-point blade, knife blade, fabric blade, engraving tip, debossing tip, perforation tip and more.
• Heat Presses Cricut makes three different sizes of heat press, to be used to apply HTV and infusible ink, along with protective heat-safe mats to place beneath your projects. Since they can be expensive, I’d recommend starting off your HTV journey using your home iron (no steam!) until you know that it’s something you’ll be doing often enough to warrant the cost. Heat presses are better than irons because the entire plate heats up evenly, to the exact temperature that you set it at (different temperatures are better for different materials; Cricut has a comprehensive heat guide) for the exact amount of time. Nevertheless, an iron can do the job too.
• Mug press Unless you own a mug-making business, you probably don’t need this, but I’ll stick it in quickly for completeness. Using Cricut Infusible Ink and Cricut polyester-coated mugs, this machine enables you to create personalized mugs.

A Bit More on Cricut Design Space and Cricut Access

As mentioned above, Design Space is where projects are created and sent to your machine. A comprehensive guide on how to use it is beyond the scope of this post, but you can upload your own images (the best format is SVG, since Cricut works using vectors. You can upload JPGs and PNGs, but the quality can sometimes suffer, depending on the usage), use shapes and insert text. You’ll want to set each element to the appropriate setting (“cut” or “draw” on the Joy, a whole variety of others on the other machines), and set all elements being cut on the same material to the same colour, so that the software will place it all on the same mat. Anything being drawn needs to be “Attached” to the element that it is being drawn onto. 

Cricut Access is Cricut’s subscription service (you get a month free when you register your new machine). It contains a wealth of projects and images for you to customize and use in your own projects, for $10 a month. If you don’t subscribe, you still have the option to search and view the available projects and pay for individual ones if you’d like. A feature I really like is that you can even open and play around with the project to see if it’s really one you want, only being prompted to pay when you press “Make It”. Many fonts are included in the Cricut Access package too, although you can use any fonts you have on your computer, you don’t have to pay to use theirs. When searching Cricut Access stuff, you can also filter by free projects to see what they have available for free.

A note about the drawing and writing feature: As mentioned, Cricut uses vector paths to cut and draw. Most fonts and drawings are made up of an outline that is then filled in, so when you set it to draw, Cricut will draw along the outline. While this bubble effect may look good for some things, it can be annoying when you want the text to look like handwriting. What you need for this is single-line fonts and/or drawings. In the font drop-down, the Cricut fonts will tell you if they have a writing style, but most of them cost. If you think you’ll use it often, it may be worth buying one or two of them even if you don’t pay for the Cricut Access subscription (most of them are included in the subscription, so if you pay for that you’re good). 

Cricut Joy also has its own app with some ready-made and quick-start projects.

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