My Cricut Cutting Machine

This bit is about my Cricut Machine and how I came about buying one. Cricut is a range of cutting machines made by ProvoCraft. It’s cartridge based and will cut any shape, character or font that is on the cartridge being used.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I am an avid fan of the Create & Craft channel, it’s a great source of information for craft. It’s where I first heard about the different Cricut machines and what they did. I already had a Craft Robo, it does a fantastic job of cutting exactly what I want. In a later post I will chat about that.

At first I was dead against getting a Cricut machine, for a variety of reasons. I felt that the cartridge based system was far to restricting, that the cartridges were very expensive and didn’t have a lot of content. Luckily I happened to see a Cricut show with Melanie Heaton, who in the space of an hour dispelled all of these worries so I decided to try the Cricut Create. The Create is one of the smaller Cricut Machines. It’s a brilliant machine, as soon as it was out of the box, I was hooked. It’s incredibly easy to set up, so I was choosing and cutting allsorts within an hour of it arriving.

Rather than going into all the technical stuff you can follow this link for the Cricut Create.

I thought the Create was big enough for what I wanted, but within a week my mind was doing overtime thinking about what else I could do with it so I upgraded to the Expression 2, it comes with a 12x12 inch mat but you can also get a 12x24 inch mat giving you even more scope.

I could never thank Melanie enough, her advice, explanations and demos have made a lot of people extremely happy. I think it’s fantastic to know that you can trust someone to tell you what’s what. Without her knowledge and enthusiasm I would have let this excellent machine pass me by. I could kick myself for not getting a Cricut in the first place.

As soon as Melanie mentioned the possibilities of cutting fabric on the Cricut, it opened up a whole new area of crafting possibilities. To stabilise the fabric you need to use some Heat and Bond to the back of your chosen material, some fabrics work better than others but craft and life’s all about experimenting.

This is a photo of a card I made with cardstock and stitched felt. The felt doesn’t cut as cleanly as other fabrics but still gives a great result, for some effects that fact would come in very useful. I used the Gypsy Wanderings and the Cindy Loo Cartridges along with papers and Basil & Buttercup Decoupage by Trimcraft.