CRICUT PRINT THEN CUT….FLATTEN OR ATTACH?! Which One Do I Use?!

help I don't know what I'm doing because I have attached all of my PNG files together but they keep cutting out separate don't worry I'm here to help because we are going to talk today about the difference in flatten versus attach when it comes to print and cut images my name is Lauren and I'm a crap producer here at makers going to learn where we bring you inspiration education and motivation to get your die cutting machine out and start using it I'm going to answer the age-old question do I flatten or do I attach and I'm going to show you two examples of why we are going to do one or the other if you are new to our Channel make sure you hit that thumbs up button and like this video subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can get notified every time we get crafty let's go ahead and talk about it which one do I do flatten or attach let's go to design space now that we're here in design space let's start building our sticker so I have already uploaded the design or the file that I want so I'm going to use this skull with flour which is going to be linked down below for you guys to use if you want to use this you can do so by getting our free 7-Day trial at the makers going to learn website where you can try our websites get 20 download credits for free for 7 Days um now you will choose if you want to go monthly or yearly after those seven days if you do not cancel my advice go ahead and go yearly because you're going to save 50% on that membership it's amazing so we're going to use this skull with the flower file and then the font that we're going to be using is Estuary can be found on our website so I'm just going to type in Estuary here and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to typ never then hit enter and better from here what I want to do is I'm going to go to Advanced ungroup to lines I'm going to bring never here and better here and I'm actually going to curve it a little bit this way and I'm going to curve this one a little bit this way and you're going to see why here in just a second I'll bring this down now what I'm going to do is with never selected I'm going to come up here to curve I'm going to curve it down this way and then once again I'm going to change it over here and bring it down a little bit closer to the skull and maybe even curve it a little bit more and then better I'm going to bring up here and I'm going to start curving the opposite way and then take this and rotate it to the right like that and then bump it up against the skull a little more and I'm going to also change the color of the words never better from Gray to Black once you have placed it where you want to we're going to select all and I'm going to add an offset now you can choose how large or how small you want your offset to be I think for this one a 025 is good we're going to click apply I'm going to change the color to white and I'll go ahead and change our canvas color as well so you can see this a little bit better and then with the offset selected I'm going to Contour out everything in the middle so this is what we are left with now we do want this to be print and cut so what you can do is go ahead and select all of this come up here to operations and you can see it says basic cut and we just want to change it to a print and cut Okay so this looks good it's a print and cut you think it looks great however you can see over here there's still all separate layers so let's talk about the difference between flatten and attach I'm going to select this duplicate the whole sticker bring it over here and we are going to flatten one and we are going to attach one so the first one here I'm going to go to attach and it looks like it's all together it looks like it's perfect the next one I'm going to come over here and I'm going to select flatten once again they look identical right so now that we're here it looks like they're both the exact same this one is attached it's all a print it says all of it says print and cut this one is a print and cut so it should be the same right let's go to make it and find out now that we're here you can can see that they're still the same they're still together they are still here so you would think that they should cut out the same what I'm going to do now is I'm going to send this to the printer and we're going to see which one you should do and why so I'm going to select continue I'm going to send it to my printer for this one you do not have to add bleed so we're going to turn bleed off and we are going to use system dialogue and hit print I'm then going to pull this down we want to feed from rear tray and best quality and then we are going to select print now that we've printed this looks exactly the same so once again this one is attached this one we have flattened and this what you're fixing to see is the most important part and why we choose one over the other so now that we're here we are going to choose the printable sticker paper I'm choosing the one with a green paper lining because I don't want it to cut all the way through and then we're going to load this into our machine what our machine is going to do now is it is registering the bounding box around our two stickers to cut them out while our cricet is cutting let's think which one do you think is going to work the best flatten or attach I guess we're fixing to find out so the reason it is taking our Cricut so long to cut this is because you can see the one that was on the right was our attached file and what our machine is doing is cutting out every single piece of this sticker which is why attach is not the solution if we are wanting to cut out one full sticker although it looked the exact same I feel like this is the issue that a lot of our friends run into is although it says it's a print and cut file we'll attach everything together and then we wonder why it all cuts out separate that's because we have to flatten the file into three or four separate layers into one single layer and I will show you exactly what it does here in just a second once it finishes cutting the flattened side of our design once it has finished cutting the flattened version so overhead you can see that this one on the right let's try to peel this up you can see that every single letter and the skull cut out and not only that but everything inside the skull cut out that is why we never want to use attach when we are trying to create a print and cut image the one on the left here we'll take it off of here and actually what I can do is I'll just take up this you can see here that the one on the left is the one that we want now that we have answered this question let's talk about why we flatten over a attach back in design space although these both look the same and I know I had some friends that were probably yelling no Lauren we don't attach but I wanted to show everyone because I truly feel like the best way to learn is by seeing it in action so I wanted to show you what each one does like I said this one is the attach is the flattened version which is the one that ended up being on the left and this one is the attached version which was the one that ended up being on the right so here although it moves around the same when we go to make it it looks the same the reason being is over here in the layers panel for our Cricut to know that we just want the outline what we have to do is we have to compress all of these layers into one layer and how we do that is not by attaching but by flattening so now you can see that it has compressed all of those five different layers into one layer and that is where our Cricut knows to just cut the outline now I know that was a roundabout way of telling you which one you need to use which is flatten but like I said I wanted you guys to see it in action because me I'm a visual learner and I think a lot of us here are visual learn Learners as well we can hear one thing over and over but until we see it in action it doesn't really sink in if you only attach your print and cut images together this is what you're going to get you're going to get everything cut out separate it's not going to be what you wanted the reason that we have to flatten is because we're taking one two three four layers compressing them all together and getting one layer here like you see on the left I hope this has answered your question and really helped you flatten versus attach if you are doing stickers or print and cut images you're always going to choose flatten and that's the reason is because we want to compress all the files into one layer if you have enjoyed this video make sure you hit that thumbs up subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can be notified every time we get crafty I can't wait to see you guys in the next one