Holiday Crafting Made Easy With Simple Cricut Tips And Tricks!

hi it's Ann from the useless crafter and today I'm going to show you just a few simple tricks to make your holiday crafting a little bit easier um I think with the holidays we're probably going to be personalizing a lot of things or you'd like to so you know names or sentiments I'm going to show you how to do that with just some like simple tricks make it super easy um and it's sort of the same process whether you're cutting in vinyl or you're cutting paper uh to make a tag for instance or if you're cutting vinyl whether it's to put you know as a sticker the adhesive vinyl or if you're using um ironon heat transfer vinyl where we're ironing it on so all of it ends up being the same because we're we're still cutting out the same name or the same sentiment um the only difference is how you apply it so I'm going to start with this one I recently did Mary and bright and I did it in three beautiful colors um if you don't know already I love 12 X12 card. shop because they have you can just easily order all the colors online so I do encourage um getting their Swatch kit because I have it here so I can tell you the colors um if you go on there the for Mary and brigh if you saw the project on Facebook or on Instagram these are the colors that I use so from The Encore line and I'll post it in the comment or in the description it's caramel caramel is the second um the second layer the first layer is this rose gold foil from basil and it is available at 12 x 12 card stock shop and then the last color is this beautiful glamour pink matte I know you're like I didn't think I was going to love the matte but as soon as I saw it so instead of it being it's mirror foil or metallic foil but matte it is gorgeous and again that color is glamour pink mat but it will be in the description okay when you're doing um like in this C I did marry and bright I'm going to show you how to download the font also in this video um the font is a little bit on the thin side so um I do still like my offsets to be thin but I'll show you um you know I like going anywhere between 05 and 07 but let's get started because it's a lot of talking you haven't seen it yet all right so first thing is um this text is uh let's see if I can remember I'm GNA so when you download your own font when you go into fonts it won't be in Cricut it'll be in system and I think this had something with toe yep pinky toe all right so I'm going to show you how to download that it's from creative faca I don't have a lot of subscriptions to um you know I just don't have a lot of subscriptions but one of the ones that I do have is creative Fabrica because I feel like the fonts are so amazing and the images as well so we'll talk about that in a second so Mary and bright okay oops all right I'm going to make it really big so that you can see this while we're talking so if you notice a couple of things this is my first layer right here um and if you can see the m is by itself but Mary and and the b is all together and then right is together I don't I just didn't want to have so many different pieces I know it's just one but it just makes it sturdier and a little bit easier so and I didn't I also wanted to make this kind of big and I didn't want it to be taken up by the space so what you want to do is immediately you go and you ungroup this okay so when you ungroup it everything is ungrouped you know like every single letter so what I want to do is I'm going to scroll up just a little bit I'm going to move the and sign over okay and I think I messed around with this b a little bit but you know I can move it there so it's connected there I wonder if that's what I did yeah and then I'm going to grab this whole thing and move it over now it's thin but if you have good HTV and or paper um this will cut beautifully um what you want to do is you want to always make sure that you have a a good sticky mat you want to use your brayer and that you don't have any debris on your um your blade so take the blade out make you know blow on it make sure everything is out of there and you should be able to cut if it's not cutting I don't know I feel like I use my um you know I don't change up my blades that often um those are I feel like if you look at those three items um and you check on that most likely you would have fixed the issue all right so here I think I like everything I think I want to move the M over just a little bit because it feels like there's a lot more space than between the B and the R so that's just me being a little bit picky I'm going move it over then the next thing you want to do is because we kind of merged this Ampersand and the B we want to weld everything because we don't want it to cut individually and what I mean by that is let me change this to a color that we can see better and you'll see that this R if I'm going to um bring it to the front you see how that R will cut into this R even though you might not see it this R is going to cut into this y as well so you want to make sure that you grab the whole thing and you go to combine and you weld it now it's all one piece this is all one um nothing's cutting into the other thing the E flows into the r the r flows into the other R Etc all right the next thing I want you to take a peek at is I'm going to make this even bigger so you can see this sometimes I feel like with the more beautiful card stock like the foil um or the the sequin glitter card stock those are white core so if you don't get a clean cut you'll see a little bit more white so this little cut right here it is so tiny that to me not worth having in there and ruining your paper so what I would want you to do is because this is already highlighted go to Contour in the bottom right hand corner and this allows us to kind of pick and choose little pieces that we don't want cut so I'm going to scroll down because it's so small it's this I don't know where these two little dots are I'm just going to click on them as well so you see I got rid of that I love the Contour feature for that it's super easy to remove things and you're just going to have a better cut all right I'm now going to make this smaller I want this to fit across a um 11 12 x 12 sheet of card stock so I'm going to actually make this maybe um because you know you can only cut 11 and a half right so I'm just going to make it 11 because we're going to do the offset and yeah so okay so now I want to do an offset that looks you know that follows this exactly right so I'm going to click on offset set you can use this little dial button to change how big you want the offset to how small you want the offset and you can do a negative um offset if you wanted to but I just like to go into this um this space right here and click 0.5 and I'm going to hit apply and I'm going to see this and sometimes most of the time I will say I do like5 but when the fonts are so thin and I'm using um really Prett Pretty Paper I want it to show a little bit more so I'll bump it up to 07 so I'm going to go in there you know Tab and it will apply it it just gives you a little bit more all around so I'm going to hit apply so my first layer is going to be that rose gold so I'll keep it this this color my second layer is the um which one is it it is the caramel so I'm going to change the color just a little bit I'm going to click on this one and go to advance and just click something a little bit darker so I know it's a little bit darker but still in that same thing all right now I'm going to grab the whole thing and I'm going to do one more offset and apply and that offset is going to be my matte um glamour pink matte just I promise you you're going to love okay so there you have it right really really easy to do the offset so if you can think I mean this is Mary and bright it could be a place setting uh it could go on to your wrapped gift your present um or you know you can do a name or a sentiment but now if you're wondering at the end of this right we have this oops let me move these two right on top um and I'm going to grab all three layers and just go to a line and I'm going to Center and that way it's back to the way it's supposed to be okay and the reason why I'm doing that is if you wanted to add a little tag right here a little circle with a hole like you know like a like you would buy let's see how big this is right now it's 11.28 we still have a little bit of room I'm going to show you quickly how to make those tags so it's basically a circle right so we're going to click on the plus sign so not used to clicking on that plus sign um all right we're going to close that up um let me see how big this original one 11.3 all right so I'm going to make this 11.3 to make it identical and then I'm actually just going to delete this just so that we have the space I'm going move this up and let's say you want to put like a little tag right here so you can put your Ribbon through it I'm going to show you how to do that so obviously we're not going to do it at 2 in um let me look at this maybe all right I'll do s we we'll see how and I want to make it even numbers just so that I can remember actually I'm going to do that I'm going to do 75 just so that my memory these days all right I'm going to click on this circle and duplicate it and make this one smaller I make this maybe five okay let's see what that looks like so it's going to be and let me change the colors so that you can see this a little bit more easily on your screen um okay so if you want to make the the ring for your Ribbon a little bit thicker which I think would be a good idea I'm going to make the smaller Circle a little bit smaller so let's go to point 4 and see what that looks like okay so now I'm going to grab the two oops let me move this move this over a little bit okay I'm going grab the two circles I want to center it right before I slice it okay so that looks about the thickness that I want I kind of like that um I'm grab both items and we're going to slice so that I can remove the center circle from the Outer Circle and I've made my little piece I think that's still a little bit big that Circle right there to turn it into a tag so we could make this a little bit smaller and do something like that right and we can make this so that it's attached to the last layer so so what you're going to do is you're going to go to this last layer hit the control button on your keyboard and I'm going to grab the purple circle so see these two are highlighted and I'm going to weld when I weld this is now my top layer nothing disappeared it just moved on you you can highlight that and arrange and bring send to the back so this is now still our original and bright sentiment but now it has a little circle in there for you to wrap the gift um all right so that's one thing let me show you how to get the fonts so um we're going to go to create a Fabrica this if you click on the link you can get a really good deal it's so worth it I have the the membership and you just have so many fonts so let me just show you really quickly you can go to fonts and you know popular this week I mean there's just so many here's pinky toe I loved it I felt like it's thin enough to be Whimsical but not too thin where you want to tear out your hair while you're working on the project so if you like pinky toe click on it you're going to download it now if you don't have the membership when you download it it will instead tell you how much it costs so it's up to you um so now that I've downloaded I'm going to go into my downloads and my double click on it to go into the folder and here it is I'm just going to double click it again and I'm install now I've already installed it so your popup will be different than this but yes let's just install it okay once you've installed it you need to close out design space it will not be in here until you close out and open it up again so let me just save this oh you know what all right I will save it save as but I'm G save it as with ribbon attachment so that way I don't lose my original one if I don't want to do this little guy all right so you're going to close it and go back into it and it will now be available I know it was available before because I had already done it all right so that's one simple thing I I will be back to show you how to do um little Shaker tags so come back and join me I am uh you know it's been a while since I've done a tutorial um I really want to get back into it so please follow subscribe and watch and let me know what you want to see thank you so much for your patience I'll see you guys next time