Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About Cricut Machines

Jul 18, 2023

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.

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.

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

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:

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 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.

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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Perfect for starting out with Cricut. This bundle and the tools below is all you need.

The tools you need to start your first Cricut project!

Tried and true!

Filed Under: Crafts & Activities Tagged With: crafts