Using a Cricut is a great way to cut vinyl in order to create custom decals, stickers, labels, and other craft projects. With a few basic supplies and some practice you can quickly learn how to cut vinyl on your Cricut machine.
Gathering the Supplies
The first step in cutting vinyl with your Cricut is gathering the necessary supplies. You will need a cutting mat, vinyl rolls or sheets, scissors, transfer tape or paper, and the Cricut machine itself. Depending on the type of project you are working on you may also want to have other tools handy such as tweezers for weeding out intricate designs.
Preparing Your Design
Once you have gathered all of the supplies it’s time to prepare your design. This can be done using either the Cricut Design Space software or a third-party vector editing program such as Adobe Illustrator. Both programs allow you to create and edit shapes and text as well as add images or other artwork that can be used in your project.
Loading the Vinyl
Once your design is ready it’s time to load the vinyl into your Cricut machine. Place the cutting mat onto the cutting surface of your machine and adhere the vinyl onto it using masking tape or other adhesive material. Make sure that the vinyl is firmly affixed onto the cutting mat before continuing.
Cutting Your Design
Now that everything is ready it’s time to start cutting! Select “vinyl” from the list of materials in Design Space and then adjust any settings such as pressure and speed as needed for your project. Once everything looks good select “go” and watch as your design is expertly cut out by your Cricut!
Weeding Out Unwanted Pieces
The next step in this process is weeding out any unwanted pieces of vinyl from your design. This is an important step if you are creating intricate designs with lots of small details since these can be difficult to remove manually after they have been cut out.
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Applying Transfer Tape/Paper
Once all of the pieces have been weeded out it’s time to apply transfer tape or paper over top of them. This will help keep all of the pieces together when they are peeled off of their backing sheet making them easier to place onto whatever surface they are being applied too.
By gathering all necessary supplies, preparing your design, loading the vinyl into your machine, cutting out your design, weeding out any unwanted pieces, and applying transfer tape/paper you can easily learn how to cut vinyl on a Cricut machine. With some practice you can quickly become an expert at creating custom decals, stickers, labels, and other craft projects with ease!