Entering the world of Arts & Crafts can be a little intimidating if you don’t have inherent artistic skills. You say you can’t draw. You say you can’t even cut a straight line. No worries, there’s a new best friend you need to meet, and his name is Cricut.
Cricut Explore Air
The newest in the line of awesome personal electronic cutters is the Cricut Explore Air. “Air” because now you can work wirelessly with your iPad. Start a design on the road, or start it in your office. Save it to the cloud and with your iPad, you can continue refining and designing where ever you’ve got an Internet connection. Save again and when you get back to the studio, you’re ready to print. (It’s not as sexy, but you can also work from your PC or Mac laptop while on the road.)
Now when you’ve got an hour stuck waiting for one the kids to finish one of their service projects, you can actually be working on your next project, not just daydreaming about it.
So how does it cut?
To say this cuts awesomely is an understatement. Cricut rather shrewdly offers what should be a complex project as your first “sample” project. After loading the software and not knowing anything about the machine, you follow some really simple instructional steps and within minutes, you’ve got a combination piece that shows the cutter’s total capabilities.
After loading a project file, and a piece of cardstock, the Cricut begins drawing a coiled telephone cord (yeah – that old school type with a wire) and writes “hello” in script before some more coiled cable. Then the cutter drops down and cuts out an antique phone base unit and handset. Cricut even cuts out the miniscule holes in the rotary dial of the phone (about a 1/16” in diameter, and cuts them perfectly.)
Add a piece of colored liner paper and you’ve got the makings of a very unique greeting card. Total time…maybe two minutes.
As good as that was, I next tried a “print and cut” pirate ship from the huge collection of images Cricut makes available. Take a look at the way the sails are connected with just super thin slivers of paper. If that blade wasn’t uber precise, those would have easily been torn apart by any other cutter I’ve used before.
And if you’ve got lots of pieces to cut, that’s where Cricut excels. It will automatically calculate the most efficient way of arranging your designs on one sheet of media. You can then go grab a cup of coffee while it prints them out. Sorry, no time for French Press. Even cutting out two dozen pieces, we’re talking fast!
So what’s that “print and cut” stuff?
Well actually, there’s two ways to do it. The Cricut Explore Air comes with a holder for a marker, right next to the cutter head. You can use that to write out a message, using any of the fonts on your computer – not just ones that you’ve purchased. After writing, the machine can cut out your work.
But, the more exciting thing that really impressed me was the capability to take any design, whether from the Cricut library or from Google Images, bleed the edge (extending the color slightly wider than normal) and printing the image using your own printer. It also adds crop marks to the printed image.
Then, taking the image from your printer, you feed it into the Cricut and it does an amazing job of trueing up the paper via the crop marks and then cutting a perfect outline of your design. I now have stickers for the accessory boxes for each of my cameras so I can quickly visually identify them.
Thinking outside the box (of overlooked Christmas cards)
So what do you do when you discover a dozen Christmas cards in March? In this case, the border design was kind of cute and I thought it went well with some “father/daughter dance” photos I had taken. Problem was, I would need to measure out and individually cut out the “frame” openings in a dozen cards. Wasn’t going to happen. Either a) I’m too lazy or b) it was too much time invested.
But…with the Cricut, I measured the first one, loaded an appropriate-sized rectangle in the Design Space app and then placed the cards on the cutting mat. Within seconds, it cut each one out perfectly. Printing some photos just the right size for the card interior, I pasted them inside.
Ended up making some cute frames from cards that were destined for the trash.
What do you want to cut?
Without even changing blades, the Cricut cuts a crazy amount of materials. Add a deep cut blade and it’ll cut almost everything except bricks. Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it will cut heavy leather and chipboard.
Here’s a list of the materials you can cut with the included blade:
Cricut Explore and Cricut Explore Air are both available now. Check them out online at http://us.cricut.com/home/