40+ Essential Cricut Tips, Tricks and Hacks

Hello my loves, I hope you are all well, it is very cold. Winter is definitely coming. The craft room hasn't warmed up yet. Therefore, there is an attractive hood. Gil. I've been crafting for about a year and a half. In that time, we've thrown out so many different

tips

,

tricks

and

tricks

, not just in the tutorials but also in the light of Facebook and also in Instagram posts and things like that, so all over the social network there's been a lot of

tips

and tricks. . and tricks that I have shared, however, I decided that they should be included in one video, so this is what we are going to do today.

There are a lot of tips, tricks and tricks in this video, so go get yourself a copper and get comfortable. and hopefully you'll learn some new tricks, so when you're just starting out and you're trying to figure out how to organize yourself and you're trying to figure out different products, it can be very difficult to figure out the difference between vinyl and iron-on for some reason is something that we've all been familiar with. difficult result when we start, there is a really quick and easy trick, so if we turn them over you will immediately see that there is a big difference, so vinyl will always have some type of card or paper backing, while iron on does not a waxy consistency on the back and there is nothing you can peel off the back.

Just by looking at them you can immediately see the difference between vinyl and they can be ironed on by simply turning them over and checking from the back, so I want to quickly talk about transfer tape. You can get many different types of transfer tape. There are three main types of transfer tape areas. There is strong grip tape. There's your normal clear type of tape and then there's a paper transfer tape. I love paper transfer tape. I use it a lot. I use it for curved surfaces or for delicate items like balloons. I use it for cards.

There are many things that can be transferred with paper. The tape is fantastic for my clear tendencies. The tape I use for most of my vinyl works brilliantly with most vinyl and is completely reusable too. Also, we have some cricket, a strong grip transfer tape. This is the transfer tape you want to use with. The cricket glitter vinyl is very thick and you can feel the shine. If you want to use the strong grip transfer tape with this, these are the only two things I use together and I don't use anything else, so I won't use another transfer tape. with the cricket glitter vinyl and I will not use the cricket strong grip transfer tape with anything other than the cricket glitter vinyl.

I have some of the normal cricket transfer tape here and when you remove it it's incredibly sticky. A quick tip. just to get some of that stick off is take some fabric or use your jeans and you'll just get the transfer tape, he'll just put it on the fabric of all your jeans and then you'll just peel it off. now you'll end up with some fibers in there, that's absolutely fine, it'll just remove some of that stickiness so that when you put the vinyl in there it won't be impossible to get it out of your ear, or if you have air, always keep my dial set to custom.

The reason for this is that you can often forget to change the settings and also if you keep the custom settings it means you will always remember to look for other settings although sometimes we may find that our blades do not cut the way they maybe we would like them to cut so the first thing you want to do is check the blades so in terms of the deep point and fine point blades on the housing it's a little push and you can push it down and then you can check your blade and you want to very gently make sure that there are no fibers in there, you don't have any card or vinyl stuck in there and just remove any kind of residue that you can find.

You don't want to run your fingers along the blade of the knife as it is very sharp so you just want to take a look at it. If there's any residue, you can get a cloth like this, which is like a car cloth, no lint or anything in there and we're literally going to use it to clean the blade of your knife with the rotating blade, if you can see there's a lot of fibers there, you don't want to do what I did and swipe there. it's the worst thing you can do, what you can do is go down there and down so give it a good whack and it will remove a lot of fibers from the fabric and again the other option is to get a cloth like this.

You want to make sure there's a sufficient amount between the blade and your finger and you're just going to very gently run the blade across the fabric in terms of your deep point, your fine point and your knife blade, and also the adhered blade of fabric. . Your best friends want to roll up a ball of aluminum foil and then they just want to go in and very gently place the blade on the aluminum foil just three or four times and that will help sharpen it if I want to cut something small. So for example, a nail decal, this is the word love and it's cut into less than five inches.

I always cut it on the washi sheet setting and go in first and remove the middle pieces once the middle piece is removed. I'm going to go in and grab a corner and then I can start gently peeling it off and voila you have a very small nail decal the washi blade setup is fantastic for really small intricate cuts once again we have Here's a really cut complex, the lines in this text are very small. I tried cutting it with the vinyl setting it just ripped the vinyl so I used the washi sheet setting and it cut perfectly so if you are working with a small text or image or a fairly detailed text or image with very small lines the setting washi sheet is the way to go this is going to be a nightmare weeding isn't going to be any fun so we're going to do something called Reverse Weeding so I've got some transfer tape here and we're just going to go in and lay it over the entirety of our vinyl design.

We're not going to read it because it will be a nightmare to weed. and this will make life a lot easier so we're going to transfer it like we normally would, we're going to roll it from the front and then from the back, then we're going to go in and peel it from the back and then we're just going to lift up a corner of the vinyl and we're going to go in and we'll gently start to peel it off and this makes life a lot easier, especially when we're dealing with these little lines like this. and you can see our vinyl stays exactly where we want it to stay so we can take this part and again we can start gently removing and then we can go in and remove all the pieces in between which will then be ready for The transfer has been nice, quick, simple and easy and we haven't had to worry about these really small, delicate lines, so I have two systems for my remains.

The first is boxes of magazines. I just bought them at Ikea and then just sprayed them. - I painted them and then labeled them and I keep a lot of my larger scraps here, so I'll keep any kind of a4, a5, nice, sizable scrap pieces in these boxes, they're all labeled and exactly what they are the vinyl or the They are ironed and I also know what brands they are with all my smaller scraps. I use all these folders here, you can collect them for free. They are great, they are small, they fit very well in a drawer I have. about 30 of them, all in one drawer and they have different types of scraps on the different vinyls, different plates, they're all labeled and that helps me stay really organized, so if I have really small pieces I put them all away. in a folder and I just write on the back what they are and where they are from.

You can write on the back of both the vinyl and the iron-on. My number one storage solution is my IKEA pegboard. I love these papers. They are amazing and give you so many different storage solutions it's amazing that you can buy so many different accessories for these and they are worth a look as you can see. I keep all my mats here, they're hung well. all color coordinated. I also have them coordinated by size and that just means they are not packed in a closet or drawer, they are hanging as they should and again it's you on my wall. storage I can also hang a lot of my tools so I have my manual rotary cutters there.

I have my Braille cloth which, as you all know, I love. I have all my different blades hanging up. Another

essential

thing. I have a storage solution for me is the cricket tool holder. This is fantastic. I have three of these and they are all packed with my tools. I have brushes in there that I use for different things, like stamping, so they're really cool, they don't take up a lot of space and they just keep all your tools in one place. Don't forget to use the storage on your Cricut machine. I like to store a lot of my different blades here.

I have my replacements. For some of my blades that have been taken out of their packaging, I have spare blades for my True Control knife and just a great storage solution. Don't forget that the front of your machine has a storage tank and stuff. The tank has a nice silicone bottom so you can store your blades upside down without having to worry about them sticking. There is also storage for your pens. Now this is on every mer machine and manufacturer you can stock. Your Pens Now I like to keep my pens upside down. There are three reasons for this.

The first is that the ink will obviously run to the tip. The second is that they are ready upside down to be placed exactly as they should in your clamp. The other reason is that as you can see, at the bottom of the cricket pens there is a letter, so these two have an F and an M, the F is a fine point and the M is a medium point, so what you can't see. only the color of the pen, but also whether it is a fine tip, a medium tip and all other tips that are also available, so there are four different materials, the blue light grip mat, the standard grip mat is available green and the purple strong grip mat and the pink cloth mat, if you are not sure which one it is, you can see on the top of each mat, it clearly tells you which mat is yours.

There are also two different mats in circulation, some will be four hours long and others. a plane now, just to be very clear, the cricket clearly says that you should not clean your mats, so do this at your own risk. My way of thinking is that if the matter is near the end of his life anyway, he will have lost his stick. We're not really going to lose anything by hitting it right, so with flour mats like this you can use chemicals like elbow grease that you can get in places like the variety in the United States.

You also have products that you can use on the mats, you want to give it a really good squirt and then let it soak for about five minutes, then you can go in with your extra large scraper and it'll just scrape off the excess which you then want to go in with a little bit of warm water. water just to remove the foam and then you can dry with a kitchen towel and then let it air dry. I have a whole tutorial on this if you find that your mats are dirty but not dirty enough to warrant cleaning you can use some alcohol free baby wipes anything like water wipes is absolutely fine you just want to give it a good brushing Quick with your target and then let it air dry if you discover that your mat has lost its stick and is more or less towards the end of its line.

You can go in with something like magic liquid, just some regular dish soap. You'll add it to your map with some warm water. let it soak for about five minutes. You don't want to use your scraper on these mats, it will remove the coating. Instead, you just want to go in with a wipe, give it a good quick wash, and then it will remove the suds. a little warm water again, you can rub with a kitchen paper and then let it air dry. Fabric mats with paint are again different so if you have large pieces of fabric or felt left over you can go in and just remove them using the tweezers if you find that you have a lot of small pieces like this all over the mat that is absolutely fine no is a problem, the mat will continue to function as it should even with these little fibers everywhere if, for example, you used non-cricket felt and find that it has a lot of fluffy fibers everywhere.

You can put some transfer tape on it and just place it on your mat and then remove the transfer tape and then it will pick up any lint that may be removable. once you feel like your pink fabric mat has come to an end, there is absolutely no adhesive there, so we can go in with our fairy liquid and we can glue them in the same way we would with the other non-flower mats , so it's a nice feature that I love the app - the snap mat, but trying to get it to fit can sometimes be a little difficult.

I think the easiest way to do this is to place the mat on the floor you want to enter and stand directly on your mat,so you want to put your phone there and I find that if you stand directly on it, it will grab it almost immediately and then it will take a photo of our snap map very quick, nice and easy to do, and then we can use it. our snap mat, so the other thing that makes Matt brave or something called fussy cutting is when you have cardstock like this and you have a particular image or area that you want to cut out, for example it could be there's a photo of a person specific or an example with this.

I want to cut out just the Merry Christmas circle but I don't want the presents around it, so now I took a picture of my mat so I can use it. Then you can see that we have our circle on our map, so we can zoom in and then place it exactly where we want it to cut. I love the blade of my knife. I really think so, but one of my biggest concerns is that until you have made the first full cut in your chipboard, basswood, balsa wood, even foam, you don't know how long it will take and of course you have already cut your material, so if it's a 3 hour cut then you're tied for three hours, it doesn't always take that long, sometimes it can be 10 minutes, it really depends on the image, it depends on the size, it depends on how complicated it is and also It depends on the material you are using.

Cutting times can vary drastically and this is where this tip really comes into play so you can see that we have our mat ready and we have no material on it. We have our knife blade in our clamp, now it has to be there because when we press the cut it will go into this corner and register our knife blade, however as soon as it comes out we will remove the knife blade from its clamp now I suggest that you only do this if you are sure to open and close that clamp if you are not sure or you feel like you are going to cause any damage, don't do it, it's your responsibility, it's your choice to do it.

This I think works wonders for me, it won't work wonders for everyone, it's just a tip that I use and I'm posting it, but you have to have confidence in yourself to be able to do it, we'll leave it at that. come in and scan as soon as you come out, we'll open plan B and remove the knife blade, then we can close clamp B and of course it will cut and do its first full operation. cut but we don't have a knife blade there and we don't have material on our mat once you've done your first full pass and we have the time and you've decided if you want to move forward or choose a different image we're going to pause and then we're going to unload the mat, then we can put our product on our mat, we can put our knife blade back into clamp B and we can do all the cutting knowing exactly how long it will take if I'm doing an intricate design or a small design.

I always use my deep cut blade, it won't separate deeper than the setting you set it to, but because the rotation angle is deeper in the deep cut, use it. it allows you to move at a better angle of rotation, so for anything small that's inclusive, I think it has plenty of detail. I always use my teeth cut paws. If I work with cardstock again, I'll turn my mat over and get started. Very gently removing all of my pieces, you want to make sure you don't go over the supplier's mat. You can use your true control knife, your Cricut weeding tools, your cricket scraper, and your cricket tweezers to help you remove your pieces if you just take your time and don't bend your mat too much, you will find that everything comes off on its own as soon as you do. ease, what is the majority of what is removed?

Then you can go in with your weeding tool or your true check knife or your tweezers and you'll be able to remove all the leftover pieces once you've removed everything again, I'm going to turn my mat over and I can use my exhale scraper or my spatula to come in and help me remove my card from my mat so I can see the back of our cardstock. absolutely perfect, we have no rips or tears there and the front is beautiful too so I think that's the easiest way to work. We have a paper transfer tape here and I have a piggy bank, you can see. which is a curved surface so with a curved surface I always use the following technique and I always use paper transfer tape because it is not reusable so I do what I am about to do; never mind the text here and I have my paper transfer tape and I'm going to transfer it like I normally would, meaning roll it up from the front, roll it up from the back and remove it from the back as well, so I have my text and I do this with images too and I've used this technique for years, you'll see it in a lot of my videos, especially all my curved surface videos, so anything like cups, balloons, punch balls, I use this technique, so I'm going to go in with my scissors and I'm going to start cutting everywhere and if I can get between my letters I'm going to do that and you just want to keep sniffing everywhere if you have two lines of text. you want to go in and you want to cut those, obviously you want to make sure that you don't meet in the middle, but you want to be pretty generous with your cut and then we can cut between each of these letters as well and as I say I'm going to use this technique for an image and for text, so now you can see my transfer tape is all over the place, but it will easily move around a curved surface.

Now I won't have to fight to get it. The transfer tape is going to go around the curved surface so my vinyl will sit naturally on the curved surface wherever it wants, so I'm going to go in and lay down the medium first and then I'm going to get to work. on each side of the top line, so we're going to work with this side first and you just want to let the transfer tape fall naturally where it wants to fall and if the transfer tapes overlap each other, that's not a problem, it's absolutely good. because that's where it wants to fall, as long as the vinyl is sitting nice and flush with your surface, that's all you have to worry about, just let it fall naturally where it wants to fall, then we can go down to the bottom line again.

We're going to start in the middle and you just want to go in and very gently start smoothing everything out and the best thing about the paper transfer tape is that since we've already gone in and cut it, it's nice. and it's easy to peel off in strips if you find that when you lift it up something like this happens where the vinyl doesn't stick, it's okay just put it down, rub it a little and it will be absolutely fine, so the vinyl is now placed exactly where it wants to sit on this nice bulb shaped money jar and again, you want to work with the middle first and come out, give it a quick roller and then we can start removing our transfer tape.

You will come across some materials that the vinyl just doesn't want to stick to things like canvas, like whiteboard, there are times when your vinyl just doesn't want to add one and I have two tricks to help you with that, so first of all, when When it comes to a canvas, whether you use vinyl or iron-on, you always want to make sure that there is something under the canvas so that there is something in the gap of the canvas. I use just a homemade pressing pillow. I use them all the time. I have a tutorial on this as like most of the tips and tricks here they have been featured in tutorials or have their own tutorial but you just want something that stays there so that when you press down the canvas isn't there.

It's going to get wet, so once you've laid down your vinyl as usual, you're going to want to go in with your scraper or your fabric scraper or your non-stick roller and just scrape it really good. Now, on this occasion, the vinyl has decided that it wants to stick, let me tell you that it is incredibly rare with canvas and whiteboard that the vinyl sticks the first time, it is actually a miracle, so we are going to pretend that it has not stuck and that we are having a real nightmare with him. My first number one trick is to pick up the scraper and take the scraper and place the transfer tape over the scraper and as you remove it scrape at the same time so you make sure that vinyl stays on that canvas and I find this method works fantastically just with canvas but also with a lot of other materials, so we'll just go in and wrap it again around our scraper and let's see how it comes. up a little bit there, we're just going to get our scraper to hold it in place, look, the view wants to go up, so what we're going to do is wrap our transfer tape around our scraper and just use our scraper to hold it.

Place it exactly in the position we want. Another option is to use a heat source like a hair dryer or even your stamping heat gun and simply step in for 10 seconds at a safe distance and lightly heat the area once you've lightly applied heat. In the area, you can go in and scrape again and then start peeling. If you find that your vinyl still doesn't want to stay, you can do the scraper trick again because we haven't just added our heat. but now we're using the scraper, so it's definitely going to add air to our canvas or our whiteboard or whatever material we're having trouble with, so I like to weed my mat.

I think it's the easiest way to do it, but I have a lot of excess, so the first thing I do is I go in with my true control knife and just cut where my design is, so I'm going to remove all of this excess. Now I want to cut hard enough to cut through my vinyl, but I obviously don't want to cut through my mat. I'm going to turn it over and then I can remove the excess. The first thing I like to do is go in and remove all the middle pieces. The reason for this.

It's just that if I'm working with text that is very small and very complex, trying to remove the middle pieces once the outer vinyl is removed is quite difficult, so I find this to be the easiest way to do it. I like to put my little weeded pieces on my finger and then I have my weeding box and I can add them all in there and keep them clean and tidy. Of course, you can use a tissue box if that's what you have in your house. Another tip for weeding. it's if you have two different words or words and a lot of different images and their different fonts and different sizes and it's all a little bit complex if you go in with your real control knife and very gently cut the vinyl so that you're just cutting the vinyl, you're not cutting the backing and you're just going to make little boxes around each of the text or image areas.

What is done is that the areas are then separated, which means that you are working with smaller weeding areas. So you can see that we can weed as pieces of the same image separately. I'm using iron-on vinyl cardstock. It doesn't matter. I always turn my mat over. I am very careful not to bend too much. My mat and I can go in and remove it that way and I think that's going to keep the card and other things from not only bending but tearing as well, so you can see I now have several layers of vinyl here instead of trying to. to place them individually in my item, I have a nice quick trick to show you here is my bottom layer of vinyl so this is my main image and then everything sits on that image so I have my bow and my transfer tape.

I'll just go in with my fabric brayer and give it a quick roll and transfer it exactly like I would to any transfer tape and just go in and place it where it needs to be. sit back down, then I can go in with my roller, then we can go in and just take off and we can keep layering this back piece like I say, then we can keep layering the top if, for example, you find that you run out a room. So you've cut it too short, okay, it's not a problem, these little pieces we can put individually in our article, but if we have most of our layers in this back piece, it just makes life a lot easier once.

You have all the layers on this back piece, then you can come and transfer them all at once, so sometimes working with glasses can be really difficult, not just because they have a funny shape, in which case you can use my trick. for bulbs or curved surfaces, but also trying to get the letters straight can be very difficult, just a quick tip is to take some water and put it in the glass or vial or whatever you are using, then you can bring the vinyl and you can put it down and you're just going to follow that water line just to make sure your letters are nice and straight and then we can quickly rub it down and then we can go in and just take it off and that junk is Now it's nice and straight on our glass so not today I have a big design because I didn't need to make one but I wanted to show you this trick so sometimes you have a really big design and you find out that your transfer tape isn't big enough so what we're going to do is this little trick like this that we'll take our transfer tape, lay down the first layer and let it sit as far as it goes. you can sit down, then we will take the second piece of transfer tape, sometimes you may need three fourfive pieces and we're just going to place it so that it overlaps the piece that's already down, then we're going to transfer It's exactly like we would normally do it, so now it's transferred in pieces and like I say, sometimes you might Whether you need to make three, four, or five, they will all stay exactly where they need to stay, and when working with glass, you'll want to do that. a little bit of isopropyl alcohol just to remove any grease or oil that you may find on your fingertips that has been transferred to the glass and to get our image and place it on our glass block, we will first remove the top layer of transfer tape .

Then you can go in and remove the next layer and you continue doing that to start with the top layer and work your way back until you have the last layer of transfer tape, so something I see a lot is I get bubbles. And you know how sometimes no matter how hard you try, you end up with bubbles, so one thing you can do is just take the edge of your scraper and just go in and really scrape that you still want to be gentle but kind? work bubbles to the side, that's one way to do it.

Another way to do it is to go in with your cloth brayer or non-stick roller and again do it that way and also take your nail and just press them down and eventually you'll be able to find you have a very stubborn one like this one here, if you get something like your true control knife or a weeding tool with a very small tip, you just go in, drill a hole and then you can go in with your finger. and that will eliminate the raised bubble. You'll still see if you look very closely, you'll still see where the bubble was, but it's not as raised.

The main roots do not have bubbles. Before you remove the transfer tape, give it a really good scrape and then when you remove the transfer tape, you remove it at a very good angle - the iron on is notoriously hard to see, we can see a little bit on the cut line there , but we can't see everything. so a quick and easy tip is to use a little bit of talcum powder, so we're just going to get a little bit of talcum powder and pour it all over the place. Just wonderful, we're going to take a piece of paper and we're going to decant our spinach, we're going to lightly put some talcum powder on our iron and then we're just going to go in and we're just going to rub it, the camera isn't going to pick it up very well, but if we move it a little bit, you can see . cut lines, obviously if you're directly above them you can see a lot better, it's definitely a trick worth remembering, so let's get to our final tips, tricks and tricks, and this one has to do with iron.

To use glitter iron on wood today you can use any iron with wood. It worked very well. Today we only have four layers, but sometimes you will have many layers. I made a bright rainbow shaped bag and the amount. to place that was ridiculous, many of you will have seen that tutorial and I talked about how you can easily layer and I showed ways you can add layers on top of each other using your H TV sheet, but today I want to show You'll See How you can do multiple layers at once to reduce your iron overheating.

Now you will see that with the wheels here we cannot put them on top because we have the carrier sheet and we cannot put them underneath like this. Because we have the HTV here and then it's going to sit on the backing sheet, all of the HTV needs to be on the wood, but what we can do is go in and take our scissors and cut as close as possible. to that wheel and come in, you're going to position it so that it's facing the right direction and then you can manually position it and make sure that it's sitting there and all of our iron can directly touch our surface. and then they're going to sit like this now just because they have the sheet on top of it okay it's not a problem they're still going to a deer and lastly we have a tree and again that's not going to be able to sit like that and if we put it under of our carrier sheet, it's going to sit under our HTV, so again we're going to go in and as close as we can to our designers, we're going to trim out our carrier sheet, so I have my ez press two sets of three hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit for 20 seconds because that's the heat that I would use it for a normal garment, so I would say a cotton garment, so that's what Initially, I'm going to use my wood, which is what I would normally use for the Asian makeup bag , is what I'm going to use for my word and because this is all a single layer, we're going to reduce the amount of time we heat up our iron.

It's not bad with something like glitter, but if you're working with something like aluminum foil, you don't want to overheat. Our carrier sheet is on, we haven't waxed or stained our word, it's completely bare, so I don't have to worry. on a heat protective sheet and we're going to go in at 340 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 seconds so once it's cooled down we're going to go in and remove the layers so we want to start with the top layer first. which in this case is our Christmas tree and we're going to go in and gently peel it off.

Then we can go in and remove the layer from the car. That carrier sheet for that wheel came off when we brought in the car layer, but this one has stayed like this so we can remove this one and finally we can go in and remove our text layer. The more layers you can put on at once, the less heat you're going to put on your iron, which you know, like I say, with gloss it's not that bad, but with things like aluminum foil you don't want to overheat them, and then we can go in and we'll put our heat protection sheet over your Teflon sheet and we'll just go into 300 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 seconds just to really seal that.

If you enjoyed this video let me know below if you want another tips, tricks and

hacks

video let me know. I have many more. There are many types of irons that I would love to share with you and if you have any tips, tricks or tricks that you would like to share with me, please put them in the comments below. I would love to read all about yours. tips, tricks and

hacks

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