The ULTIMATE Cricut Solutions For All Your Crafting Dilemmas! From Print Then Cut To Crafting Basics

if you are someone that feels like you are constantly struggling with print and cut then you are in the right place today we're going to go over so many different things to help you overcome those struggles and make you a print and Cut Pro my name is Lauren I'm a craft producer here at makers going to learn if you are new to our Channel make sure you like this video subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can be notified every time we get crafty so if you are ready to learn all the tips tricks and everything you need to know about print and cut get your notebook and pencil out and be ready to take notes because I'm about to help you learn all the things that you need to become a prin and Cut Pro the first thing that I want to talk to you all about is learning when and when not to add an offset and I have discovered that this is a real issue for a lot of our crafty friends because I have discovered that when we pull in a PNG Cricut automatically puts it on a white canvas background so a lot of our times our brain thinks that because we are printing on a white piece of sticker paper that it's automatically going to have an offset but one thing that you need to learn is that design space does not know what we want it to know unless we tell it so let's go ahead and hop over to our share screen so I can explain and show exactly what I mean and what you need to do to make sure that you don't have this issue ever again now that we're here in design space you can see that I have a lot of different pngs pulled up on our canvas now if you didn't know any better you would automatically think that this sticker right here the Cricut would just cut all the way around it cut this out very nicely and the same with all of these others however when you are pulling in pngs if you do not know if it has an offset or not your first thing that you should do especially when working on a white background is come down here to the bottom right hand corner where it says blank canvas we're going to click that and we're going to come up here to the top where it says color from there you're going to click on that color and you can change your canvas color to any other color except for white so I'm just going to go with gray and now you can see that everywhere that is gray your Cricut is going to cut out around that so if we zoom in you can see it's going to cut out all of these different letters in this ye-haw sticker it's going to cut out the Stars individually in summer break and the only two that it will cut out around it is going to be this sticker here and this one here because it's automatically going to cut that Circle There's No Gray inside that so now we can see which stickers need an offset and which do not so now all we're going to do is come to each separate sticker and we are going to select offset and now you can make it as large or as small as you want I've discovered that I really enjoy the15 in offset I think it's a really good area it gives you enough room for error but it's still not too big so then you're going to apply that if you want it to stay black cricket is going to automatically put all of your offsets black but then what you would do is come up here to the top where you see the operations and you would just change the color back to white but keep in mind these are still separate once you have added your offset turned it to White you need to select them both by either dragging and dropping or selecting them both on your layers panel come down here to the bottom right and flatten those together so now you just have to go to each sticker add that offset change it to the color that you desire select them both flatten them together same thing with this one we are adding our offset applying it changing the color selecting them both see this one is just got the first one selected it doesn't have my offset make sure you drag and drop and choose both of them flatten them together summer break we're doing doing the same thing applying that changing the color dragging and dropping flattening them together hello summer offset apply change your color select them both flatten now I saved this one for last for a reason okay now this one if you run into this issue here is what you need to do so we're going to the go to the offset oh my gosh I have the 0.15 but I can see it's still going to cut out the inside of the sticker and I don't want it to do that well we're going to leave it on the 0.15 because I think it's a good size for the outside of the sticker we're still going to hit apply we're going to change the color to white but I still see gray in there so you're probably thinking Lauren what do I do first thing you need to do if you go to drag and drop you see that you can flatten this together but if we just select this offset let's say we want to get rid of those your first step is going to be go to Contour however when you go down to this bottom Contour is gray out and we can't work with that here is what you need to do because this file was a PNG or a print and cut file to begin with your offset is also going to be a PNG which means you cannot Contour any of those inside pieces out what you need to do make sure your offset is selected see here on our layers panel we have the offset selected we're going to go back to the top left where it says operations and here you can see that that offset is a print and cut file we're going to click this arrow pointing down bringing our drop down menu and change it to a basic cut now it did change the color to gray so we're going to go ahead and change it back to white and now while the offset is selected coming back down here to the bottom right we can see that Contour is now an option for us so we're going to click that Contour we're going to hide all Contours which means it gets rid of everything on the inside exit out and now you see we have a perfect offset completely around your file so just like we did with the others we're going going to click and drag and drop make sure they are both selected see we have them here both selected and flatten them back together now you should be ready to go with your stickers however I want to touch on something that may be more of a struggle mentally and that is you feeling like you waste so much paper when you are doing print and cut what you need to do is make sure that you are pre-planning to take up every single inch that you can on your paper now that may be if you're be doing a larger print and cut have some smaller stickers in mind that you want to create just to put on your page so that you can make sure you get the most out of that page of stickers because it's really really hard to use the same piece of sticker paper multiple times you can also manually move these stickers around and place them where you want them on the sheet because what Cricut does is it just automatically places those stickers where it thinks it is best however there are ways to manipulate that to really get the most out of your page and let me show you how you can do that once you have your stickers ready to go what you're going to do is go to make it and here you can see that Cricut has placed all of these stickers on two separate pages however I feel like there is still some room for us to work with so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to manually manipulate some of these files move them around you can turn them different ways here you can see we can place this one here I think if we turned this one long ways and then you can go here and you can hit let's say we wanted to move this one back to page one you can hit the three three dots move object and move it to this page bring it over here and you can see we now have more room to work with once you have moved everything to the same page you can see we have saved a whole sheet of sticker paper and you are now ready to print another thing that you may be doing that may be giving you so much trouble is you are not using your system dialogue it is very very important when you are doing print and cut to always use system dialogue now we also get the question what about bleed bleed is really there for when you do not have an offset or you have a do not have a white offset because we are printing on white paper for this instance we don't need to add bleed now if we had a black or a colored offset on all of these stickers and we wanted no room for there to be any white on there then that is when you would add the bleed because that gives more room for error if your Cricut is off just a hair when you are using system dialogue especially on a Mac computer you're going to H print this may be look like it's loading for forever Windows tends to not have this issue it automatically pops up but if you are using a Mac what you need to do click Cricut design space pull it down because your dialogue box is going to pop up behind Cricut design space another issue that we see a lot of people run into is not getting the best quality print so you need to make sure that you are always doing best quality and we love feeding our sticker paper from the rear tray we feel like it just gives a little bit better of a print it doesn't bend that sticker paper as much so make sure you are feeding from rear tray and you are using best quality always another issue we see a lot of Crafters running into is if they are using glossy paper getting lines through your prints so if you want to change your media type to photo paper that tends to give a better print on a glossy piece of sticker paper once you have printed your sticker paper I want to show you a few other things to help you have zero issues when it comes to print and cut you always always want to make sure that you line up your sticker paper in the top left corner this is especially if you are doing larger print and cut size if you have extra room on your left hand side of your paper you may have to cut that off to make sure it lines up in the top left corner you do not want your sticker paper lined up in the middle on the top top right we're always lining our PR and cut in the top left corner once you have done that we have a lot of friends that have issues especially with shiny sticker paper and the reason being is because a lot of times the brightness of the Lots in your room will affect your Cricut and how it reads those registration marks because the light bounces off that shiny paper first thing you need to try is turning off your lights because if you did not know your Cricut actually has a built-in light in the housing here that will turn on once you load your print and cut paper if for some reason that still does not work Scotch tape is going to be your best friend what you're going to want to do is take the Scotch tape tear off a small piece and we're just going to cover up those registration marks and make sure it's down really well just to mattify those registration marks that way there will be no light bouncing off of them and it will give your Cricut more a better ability to read those lines another issue that some of our crafty friends have if you are printing on matte paper may be that your registration marks aren't dark enough and this could be because your printer may be low of black ink but do not fear if that's the case what you need to do is grab a Sharpie and take that Sharpie and then just go over your registration marks to darken them last but not least is if you are having issues and your Cricut is not cutting where it should cut make sure you always calibrate your machine now we have a lot of our friends ask how long or how often do I need to calibrate your machine and that's really going to be based on your machine and how it works as soon as you notice that your machine is cutting off that is when you need to calibrate now there is a regular calibration and a find calibration and let me show you exactly where to find that to find your calibration you're going to come up here to the hamburger or the three lines in the top left corner click that you're going to come down here to the second place and you're going to click calibration because we have our Explorer 3 here in our studio today it only gives us the print and cut calibration so we're just going to select print and cut you're going to choose the printer that you are going to be using for your print and cut stickers and then you are going to print the calibration sheet once you have done that you are going to line your calibration sheet in the top left corner make sure it is down on your mat really well and then you're going to click continue you're going to choose your machine and then you're just going to follow the prompts on the screen what it's going to do is it's going to cut all of these lines one through 21 and then a through U and what you will do is go through and select which number cut right on the line and then which letter cut right on the line once you have chosen the number that cuts the on the line and then the letter your cricet will know exactly where to cut and it's going to cut out that Center Square and your calibration should be complete and your Cricket ready to go I really hope you have enjoyed this video and I really hope that it has helped you troubleshooting all of your print and cut issues if you have enjoyed this video we have another amazing troubleshooting video for you to watch check it out here hey guys if you stumbled across this video you're probably thinking I cannot use this Cricket machine my crafts are failing and I do not know where to go well you have came to the right place I'm going to give you all all of our best tips and tricks on how to make your crafts a little bit more fail proof and show you all some little things that you may be doing that are causing issues with your projects today I've got lots and lots of things at my sleeve so make sure to stay tuned and we'll go ahead and get right into the video if you're new here my name is Alicia I am a craft producer here with makers going to learn and we bring you inspiration motivation and education to get your die cutting machine out get started make your life a little bit easier when you're learning something new such as the Cricut as well as other crafts we want to see you all succeed and that's why we thought let's put together all of the fails that we see all of the things that we get questions on a lot and answer all of that in this video so that you all feel better prepared to actually create your projects one of the first things that we see whenever we are working with Crafters is they typically are starting with like a paper project or something that uses glitter card stock things like that and they don't know which adhesive to use and so I thought let me bring in all of our most used adhesives and show you all what they work best for so right here I have some of our top used adhesives when we were working with paper crafts now typically I'm going to go for my atg gun and my Zig two-way glue pen when I'm working with standard card stock the zig two-way glue pin this is basically like a paint marker um you can see it has this chiseled tip they even have wider tips and more fine point tips as well it's called the zig two-way glue pen and it works just like a paint marker this is great for standard card stock now sometimes people will try to use a zig 2A glue pen when they're working working with glitter card stock that is not going to be your best bet if you are wanting to work with glitter card stock a lot of times I'll recommend a hot glue gun now this is our Precision tip Lin ly glue gun it's a Precision tip glue gun as in it has this very fine point where the glue comes out it's also Wireless it has a base that has a wire on it but the actual gun does not this is really really good for precise paper produ s especially ones that use glitter because the glitter does not like to adhere to anything because it is a textured surface so we recommend hot glue guns for glitter card stock projects now the atg gun is something that you can use for a mixture of different paper card stocks so you can use this for like a standard solid card stock as well as other types like foiled card stock and glitter card stock as well if you find that you're trying to layer a piece of glitter card stock stock on another piece of glitter card stock and it's not sticking with your atg gun I would just opt in for a hot glue gun situation so it's really going to vary depending on the project you're making just know that if you're having issues with your glitter card stock sometimes the hog glue gun is just your best bet we also use things like the alen tacky glue this is a Precision tip as well obviously you all can tell that we love more precise gluing tools whenever we're working with card stocks so so this one is great it's just an allpurpose adhesive if you are building a bigger card stock project where there's a lot of area to cover you don't want to go in with a thick goopy glue like Elmer's or something like that mainly because it's going to cause bumps and waves in your paper and so that's where your atg gun is going to come in really handy this is just double-sided adhesive you just put it on the back of whatever you're wanting to attach it's dry immediately because it's just double dou sided adhesive and it's not going to leave all of those waves the thicker glues like Elmer's glue and things like that they're going to cause those waves in your paper and it just does not look good so that's why we really really gravitate towards this atg gun um in the membership our maker is going to learn membership we actually do show you all how to use and change out the roles of film in this so if you're like what the heck is an atg gun we do have stuff within our membership that's going to help you all learn how to use this so these are like the biggest things that we use whenever we're talking about adhesives um this isn't all of them obviously but this is the majority and these are ones that we gravitate to on a daily basis something that we get lots of questions on are heat settings now with different types of vinyl and different materials as in like the blanks like t-shirts and things like that there's going to be different heat settings for different types of products as well as the blank that is actually adhering onto so it's going to be very very broad wide range of different heat settings what we always recommend is that whenever you purchase a vinyl typically on their website they will have things like you need to set it to this exact temperature you need to press it for this long if you're using vinyls like Caesar or Starcraft you can easily go and onto Google and just search Caesar Starcraft you can go onto their website they're going to you heat settings for all of that something that we offer here at maker going to learn is our Cricut reference guide so when you become a member you get this PDF reference guide that you can pull up anytime that you want we have heat settings for all different bases we've got heat settings for puff vinyl heat transfer vinyl all the different blanks for wood and for t-shirts even so lots of different ways that you can go about it just make sure that you're checking those heat settings before you're considering it a fail if you're just going in and you're like I'm just going to you know press my little mini easy press on my HTV and hope that it sticks if you don't apply the amount of heat that is required you're not going to have long lasting projects so make sure that you were just following those instructions as closely as possible and you're going to get good results almost every time another thing we get questions about is warm peel versus cool peel now you may be brand new to cricketing or using heat transfer vinyl and that's okay what I'm referring to is when you're going to peel the transfer sheet off so typically with heat transfer vinyl you have a builtin plastic sheet which we call our carrier sheet or our transfer sheet and what you'll do is cut your design from the back of the vinyl so you mirror your design when you're in design space you mirror it and then it cuts and then you weed off any part of the HTV that you don't want and then you're left with just the design and the carrier sheet well then you take that vinyl design you put it on your T-shirt and then you're like wait when do I peel off that carrier sheet cuz obviously it's not going to stay on there you only want your design to stay on there well a lot of times you're going to need to do a warm peel sometimes even a hot peel depending on the type of vinyl now most htvs that we use here in the studio are hot to warm pills so we can pretty much pull it off right away now there are some exceptions that do cool peels a lot of times glitter vinyl will be a cool peel and that means you just need to let it be completely cool to touch before you actually peel that carrier sheet off DTF is another instance where you're going to do a completely cool peel otherwise it will ruin your project so always make sure that you are checking what the instructions say when you order vinyl and if it doesn't come with any in your packaging or anything like that make sure to check the websites of the brand of vinyl that you're using because it's going to vary from Brand to Brand the next thing that I want to touch on is transfer tape now transfer tape is something that you're going to typically be using with adhesive vinyl so we just talked about heat transfer vinyl these have the builtin transfer tape or Carrier sheet you're going to hear it referred to both of those things at different times but we typically will call this the transfer tape this is for adhesive vinyl so sticky vinyl that does not need heat in order to adhere to the blank this is something that we get so many questions on because there are lots of different transfer tapes out there that you can use now one that we gravitate towards and that's mainly because this is a good medium Tac transfer tape is the Caesar transfer tape this is a gritted medium tack when I say medium tack I'm meaning it's not super strong so this is something you could use on just standard adhesive vinyl if you were working with something like glitter ades adhesive vinyl you're going to want to use a stronger grip because it needs to grip up that adhesive vinyl it's just a little bit thicker usually so just like your standard adhesive vinyl a medium tack transfer tape is going to work perfectly Caesar brand is amazing you can purchase this on the 143 vinyl website as well as other places and then a lot of times you'll find certain vinyls need their own transfer tape and I have found that working with tech wrap which is just a very specific brand of vinyl they have their own transfer tape and I personally usually like to use the tech wrap brand transfer for that vinyl so a lot of times you'll get into new vinyls and things like that and you're like why is it not transferring with my Caesar transfer tape my Caesar transfer tape works all the time I don't know why it's not working sometimes you just need to use that Brand's transfer tape um it could be that it could even just be need a stronger grip or you need a lighter grip they have light grip transfer tapes I will say we hardly ever use a light grip transfer tape though this medium is like the go-to we use this 90% of the time unless we're working with a tech R brand and you're going to be pretty safe on most adhesive vinyls if you're using this specific one a lot of times people will message Us in and they're like I keep using this specific brand of adhesive on my wood signs and it keeps peeling up and I don't know what's happening is it my cyant is it something else is it just the heat I don't know and a lot of times it's because they're using a cheap vinyl when I say cheap I mean as in quality so we don't encourage stealing our projects as much because if you use a high quality heat transfer vinyl or an adhesive vinyl typically it's going to last pretty long I mean unless youve got it directly out in the weather those are going to you know cause vinyl to peel up and things like that or if you've done heat transfer vinyl on a T-shirt and it's getting washed every other day cuz someone is wearing it often those are things that are just naturally going to cause the vinyl to come up it's not meant to last forever but we do recommend that you are investing in a highquality vinyl now some of our favorite ones that we use around here on maker going to learn are the Caesar brand easyweed I will link this all below for you all so you want to check it out um the Caesar brand easyweed is amazing the Starcraft brand for adhesive vinyl weeds like butter it is so good it cuts so good so we use Starcraft for our adhesive vinyl and Caesar for our heat transfer vinyl most of the time um there are a couple other brands that we love but we know that those are very high quality and we know that they're going to last a long time so I really want to encourage you all if you keep having fails not even just with vinyl but if you're like working with with a very cheap glue maybe from the Dollar Tree or something like that and you're like why are my projects not saying ad here together consider maybe the quality of the products that you're using and that way whenever you go to make your projects you're using high quality products that you know are really helping you achieve the best results when you use cheaper products sometimes it's hard to gauge whether it's you whether it's the product whether it's just the project in general not working out so uring that you have those high quality products already on hand is really going to help you all succeed in your crafting Journey now on the subject of vinyl and quality products a lot of times people are confused about which type of vinyl they need to be using on which surfaces now I've already covered heat transfer vinyl and kind of how it works we talked about adhesive vinyl a little bit those are the two main ones that you're going to typically see now the biggest thing is that heat transfer vinyl is great for textiles and adhesive vinyl is better for things like tumblers wine glasses more of like a hard surface um a lot of times people get conflicted when it comes to sign making should I use heat transfer vinyl on this wood or should I use adhesive vinyl because you can use both hand in hand like we just touched on if you're using a high quality vinyl it's really not going to matter um when it comes to sign making I do have personal preferences and if you make signs a lot you're probably going to have personal preferences but this isn't just for signs I want to say that typically if you're wanting to use a heat transfer vinyl you're going to want to be working with textiles when I say text Styles I mean like t-shirts duffel bags things that you can actually iron on and apply heat to you're not going to want to apply heat transfer vinyl to something that can't take heat so you've got to think like if I'm going to put this heat transfer vinyl on it can I put an iron on that base Fabric or can I apply heat to that or is it going to mess up whatever is underneath it so if it's something like a wine glass adhesive vinyl is probably going to be your better bet and it's really just going to depend on what your base is so consider things like the heat application and if your blank can actually take that heat and other things like that the last topic that I want to cover in terms of your craft projects failing is that you don't know where to start my best advice for you all here is to become a member of the makers going to learn Community we have so many resources within our website that really are going to help you all get started on your crafting Journey if you've been wanting to really jump into it and you've got a cricket and you've been kind of playing around with it but you feel lost we want to be there to help you all step by step hand in hand we have so much good information on our website we have courses we offer master classes we've got a private Facebook group where everybody is kind of working together to get a good result and you can always ask questions on there we will answer you directly we also have people in the community that will answer that you can reach out to and it's just very helpful whenever you are on that crafting journey and you really just feel like uh I keep failing I don't feel like I have anyone to ask questions to rather than scouring the internet you can just come straight over to the me's going to learn community and we can be there to help you every step of the way if you're ready to sign up today make sure to click the link in the description below we would love to have you all as a part of our crafting Community we cannot wait to see you guys and until then we'll see you in the next video bye