Master Cricut Design Space in 2024 | Beginner Cricut Tutorial

If you just got your very first Cricut machine or you're thinking about getting one, you'll need to learn how to use the Cricut Design Space platform which allows you to make all sorts of fun crafty projects with your Cricut machine. If we're just meeting right now, hi my name is Nisha. Welcome to Little Craft Nest. So today I'm going to show you all around the Cricut Design Space platform. Even if you've been using it for a little bit, I'm sure you'll And at the end of this video, I'll take you through how to make a simple project in Cricut Design Space and we'll go through step by step so that you know how to use your Cricut machine. Before we jump onto the computer, I want to answer one of the most popular questions that I often get and that is, is Cricut Design Space free? And the short answer is yes, it's free. Even if you don't have a Cricut machine yet, that's okay. You can still download Cricut Design Space and play around with it on the platform. There's also a Cricut Design Space app which is also free and you can use that as well, but today I'll be showing you the desktop version. However, there is also a paid subscription service called Cricut Access. Cricut Access basically gives you more tools, more images, and more fonts that you can use within the Design Space platform. You may want to grab a notebook and a pen as we get started and maybe a cup of tea. I will leave the timestamps for everything in the description because I know this is a long video and there's just so much information. So if you want to go back to something, you'll be able to easily go back to the piece that you want to go over. So let's jump onto the computer and get started. So once you have downloaded Cricut Design Space to your computer or your laptop, this is what your home screen will look like. At the top right hand corner, you'll have your username and on the home screen here, there'll be a whole pile of inspirational ideas to get you crafting. So if you scroll down here, you'll see a whole pile of different project designs, new fonts they've added, ideas for GIFs, and so much more. Now this home page is often changing, so what you see on here today may not necessarily be what you see tomorrow. They're just trying to give you lots of inspiration to get you crafting. And sometimes there'll also be some ads like this one here, advertising 30% off. So if we start over at the left hand side of your screen, so right now we're under discover, and if you click below on inspire, you'll get more of the same type of thing, different project ideas that you can make. And then below that is my stuff. Now once you've created a number of projects, this is where your projects are gonna show up. So right here you can see a number of my most recent projects, and once you have created a few projects yourself, you'll see your projects right here. Now beside my projects is bookmark, and these are things that you have saved. So if you go back to that inspire page that we were just on, and you click on one of these bookmarks, this is where those bookmarks will show up. So if you see something you really like, just click on that bookmark, and then you'll be able to easily find them later on. And then beside that we have ready to make. So here's more project inspiration, and then we've got all. So this here is just a combination of everything. Also on the left hand side we have what says collections. So you can save your projects in file folders if you want to. So if you don't have Cricut access, you'll be limited to only being able to create five different folders. But if you do have Cricut access, you'll be able to create more than five different folders. So if I click on holiday, these are all the projects that I saved in this category. Now also on the left hand side we have two tabs here at the bottom. This one here is the Cricut heat guide. So if you click on that, that'll open up a new tab and take you to Cricut's heat guide, and this just helps you to determine the correct times and temperatures for the projects that you are making. And below that there's a little shopping bag here, and if you click on that, that takes you over to Cricut's website where you can purchase different supplies, machines, and materials. Now if we go up to the very top beside home, we have canvas. So you can either click on canvas or you can click on new project, and both those buttons are going to take you to the same screen. So if I click on canvas here, this is the design space canvas we will be using. But I'm going to go back to home because I want to show you what's over on the other side of the screen here. So beside your username, there is a little bell here, and that's our notification button. Under notifications, design space will alert you if there's any new updates that you need to do. It will also alert you when people like your projects. Now you don't have to make your project shareable for other people to see, but if you do, you'll be able to see when people like those projects. Also under notifications here, we can click over here to the side and it'll show us our design space settings. Now you can also get to them another way. So if you click on your username at the drop down menu, you can also go to settings right over here. So underneath your name, you can change your profile information there. You can set your notifications. So if you don't want to be notified every time someone likes your project, you can turn that off and it's up to you what notifications you want to receive. And then we have our settings. So let's dive into design space settings. So under general, this is just our basic information. So country, Canada, my language is English, and then you can choose how you want your project saved. So you can save them to your cloud and computer or to the cloud only. And then under that we have application experience. Now I have mine set to beta, but you can also set yours to live. So beta is basically the testing mode of design space. So when they come out with new features and things like that, you're able to use those features. Now, sometimes those new features do have a few glitches and that's why sometimes people don't like to use beta. I like to use it because I like experiencing with what's new, but if it's presenting a lot of problems, I will switch back over to the live version. And the live version is usually a little bit more reliable. Now, if you do encounter any glitches or problems, you can click below on report issue and you can let Cricut know of the issues you're experiencing and maybe other people are experiencing those same issues and they will work on those to get those problems resolved. Under that we have subscription and it's just telling me when my subscription renews. It doesn't renew until next February. And then under that, it just tells you what version of design space you are using. Now let's go back up to the top and beside general, we have machines. So if you haven't already, this is where you would set up your new Cricut machine. If you have more than one, you'll need to set those up as well. We have an update firmware option here. I have never had to use this before. Then under that we have machine calibration. This is something you'll want to do, especially if you plan on doing any print and cut projects. A print and cut project is where you print an image out on your printer and then you have your Cricut cut around that design. Now I have several videos on that, so if you're interested in that, let me know in the comments and I'll direct you towards the right video. Then under that we have machine care. Now this is for the Cricut Venture, which I don't have. The Cricut Venture is Cricut's largest machine and it does take up quite a bit of space and that's why I don't have that machine. I already have so many crafting projects. I'm not sure if I have enough room in my craft room for the Cricut Venture, but I would love to try it out. Under that we have custom material settings. Now there's another place to do this as well, so we're not going to worry about this right now. I do have a video on how to make custom material settings and that's more of an advanced lesson, so we're not going to go into that today. And link cartridges also you don't have to worry about. This is for those ancient machines. Those cartridges are no longer sold. All right, let's go back up to the top and click on canvas and here you can change your canvas grid lines, but I'm going to show you an easier way how to do that later. You can choose your unit setting whether you want to use imperial or metric. I'm in Canada. I seem to switch back and forth all the time, but I usually do do imperial because the majority of my audience is from the United States. Then operation type is on. Yes, you don't need to change that. Then we can go back up to the top and go to load type again. You don't really need to change anything here because you can change that later on too while you're making your designs. And then we've got notifications, which I mentioned earlier. So if you don't want to be notified when new people are following you, you can turn off that toggle or any of these other toggles here as well. And then we have system and it's just telling me that I'm using my Mac computer to run this and what version I am using of that. So we're done looking through that. So let's go to the fun piece and look at the canvas. So here we are in the canvas and this is where you're going to create so many amazing projects and you're going to come to really love this program. There are so many fun things you can do with design space, but I'm not going to have time to go into lengthy detail for every single feature, but I will do my best to cover the basics as much as possible. So let's start at the top left hand corner right here says new. So if you are working on a project already and you wanted a new canvas, you could just click on new right here. Under that we have templates, which you probably won't use a whole lot, but I use it every now and then. So let's say you wanted to make a banner. You could click on this right here and this is just a reference guide. So nothing is going to cut out because you put this template on your screen. It's just giving you guidelines for what you are making. I find this comes in handy more so when you're making t-shirts and you want to visualize what it's going to look like. So if we scroll down here, let's click on maternity shirt for the fun of it. You can choose your type, which the only type we have right here is short sleeve. So we're going to keep that there. You can choose the size, but keep in mind these sizes may not be 100% accurate as different manufacturers often have different sizes. So it's really important to measure the material you're using. You can also change the color of the shirt. So let's say you're doing a blue shirt and then if you put a design on top, you kind of get an idea of what it's going to look like. Under templates, we have projects and just like before when I showed you earlier, it's just a whole pile of different project ideas. If you're not quite sure what you want to make, you can also search for projects. So you could type in cards and you'll see a bunch of different cards here. Under projects, we have shapes. Now shapes I use quite often. At the top, we have shapes that are free for anyone to use regardless if you have Cricut Access or not and below you'll see that there is an A here. So every time you see this A symbol here, that means that these shapes are for Cricut Access members only. So there are a pile of extra shapes here, but I generally tend to use the basic shapes that are right at the top. So you could click on any shape you want. Here's a heart and you can use that in the design you're making. Now under shapes, we have images and this is where you can search the design space library for piles of different images. So let's say you wanted a dog, so you can type in dog and you'll be presented with a whole pile of fun dog images here. Now because I have Cricut Access, most of these are free for me to use and again you'll notice that A in the top corner. Now the second one here does not have an A and below it, it says free. So that means if you don't have Cricut Access, you could use that image for free. You can also go under filters and click on free and you'll be able to see free images that you can use for your project. Now sometimes these images do change from time to time, so just because it was free this week, you may not be able to use that same image or font next week for free. So that's just something to keep in mind if you're creating designs using Cricut images. So under filter as well, there's other ways you can filter your designs. You could choose to use edible images. There is also a tab here that you can click on to to search for edible images and that just means that it's an image usually that contains text and you can change out the text for your own text. So if I were to click on edible images, you could click on something here like this one has the name Alyssa. So you could add that to your canvas and change the name and put your own name there. So let's go back to images here. You can also search for your bookmark images like I talked about before. So if you clicked on this little bookmark and you had saved this image because you really liked it and want to use it in the future, you can click on bookmarked and that will come up and you can also filter by uploaded. So if you have uploaded your own dog designs to Cricut Design Space, you can find them by clicking that here as well. You can also find your uploaded images by clicking on upload down here, but we'll get to that in a minute. Now even if you have Cricut Access, sometimes some of the images you do still need to pay for. So there may be some licensed or specialty images that are not included in Cricut Access. So if you purchased any of those, those would be here. Or if you don't have Cricut Access and you just want to pay for the images as you go. So for example here, if you wanted this dog and you didn't have Cricut Access, when you went to make your projects, you would have to pay $1.39 for this image. So you could search for your purchased images there. You can also filter by operation type. So you may want to just look for cut files or draw files or print and cut files and you can find what you're looking for that way. You can also filter by layers whether you want a single layer image or a multi-layer image. Now below layers we have a project type and you could search these different categories here. So we've got projects for watercolor markers or stencils or cards and you can click on one of those to see if something comes up that you're interested in. Under that we have material and a lot of these images you could use with a variety of different materials. So you could cut this dog out of vinyl, you could cut it out of leather, you could cut it out of cardstock or sticker paper. So chances are you probably won't search by material too often but that option is there. Under that we've got language so maybe you speak a different language or we even have ASL here so you could click on that. I don't have any ASL dogs but if we got rid of our text there we can see what ASL images we do have. So these are fun as well. And then we've got available offline and then licensed content. Now these are ones you'll need to pay for. So I'm in Canada so if I click on Disney the only thing I'm getting is a crown. But if you live in the U.S. you'll end up with a whole pile of different Disney images that you can use. Now these are not included in Cricut Access so even if you do have Cricut Access you will need to pay for those images. However I do get Marvel's images so if I wanted to make a Marvel's project I've got a bunch of fun characters here that I could use. And like I said before I do have Cricut Access but if I wanted to do this Hulk looking character here it would cost me $2.79 in order to use that image. And then you can also search by creator so whether Cricut created that or an image from one of their contributing artists. All right let's go back to our canvas. That was a lot of information. So we just looked through a pile of different images. Now we're going to look at text. So under images you can click on text and that's going to put a text box on your screen and you could type out anything you want to type out. So since we're doing dogs let's just type out the word dog. So there we have our text and I'll show you how to edit that in a minute after we go over all these features in the left hand panel. So under text we have phrases and once again this takes us back to a whole pile of different images and we can sort these the same way we sorted the images earlier. You can search for different phrases. So here's one hello summer. If you wanted to you could add that to your canvas. It's just giving you a whole pile of fun and different ideas you could use for your project. Underneath phrases we have editable images which I mentioned before so we don't need to go into that again and then we have upload. So I have done videos on uploading images. These are just a few of the more recent images that I have uploaded. So if you have uploaded anything to Design Space you'll see them here. Now this isn't all my images. If I wanted to see them all I would click on view all over here and I could search through all the images that I have uploaded to Design Space. A lot of the times when I do upload images I give them tag names as well so you could search your images. So if I typed in bunny you would see all the bunny images that I have uploaded to Design Space. Again you can search your different file collections as well. So let's go back to the canvas and we've got one more tab at the bottom of this left hand panel and that's I talk about this in my last video quite a bit where I talk about different font hacks and this is one of them and it's a lot of fun to play around with. So basically you just write some initials in the top. You can do a b c and you can come up with a whole pile of fun different monograms that you can make and cut out. But once again this is only available if you have Cricut access. If you want to learn more about this feature go ahead and check out my last video. Now let's go along the top of our screen and look at all the fun functions that we have here. So we're gonna click on our heart. We're gonna stretch it out a little bit and let's say you didn't like how you stretched out your heart. The first option we have here is the undo button. So that little back arrow you can click on that and that will move your heart to the last place you had it. And there I just shrunk it again but let's make that big once more. And then beside that undo button we have the redo button. So if you undid something you didn't like that you undid it you can click on the redo button. Now you'll notice that everything here is grayed out and that's because I have nothing on my screen selected. So you need to have something selected in order to see these options. So I'm gonna select the word dog here and you'll notice all of a sudden a whole pile of different options just popped up. So I'm gonna make the word dog here bigger and the first thing we have here is operation and then underneath it it says basic cut. Let's click on that drop down menu there. Basic cut is probably what you're gonna do most often with your Cricut machine. That's just having your Cricut cut out your vinyl or cardstock or whatever material you're cutting out. Underneath basic cut we have wavy and perforate. Now these you're probably not going to use a whole lot. You need special blades for these two functions so we're not going to worry about those today. Under cut we have another function called draw. So if you didn't want your Cricut to cut out these letters but instead draw these letters. So under draw you can click on pen and you would then put a pen in your Cricut machine and your Cricut would draw out each of these letters. We also have a foil option here and again you're probably not going to use this function right away. You may down the road and it's really fun to use. I do have a video on that and basically it will transfer gold or silver or bronze foil onto cardstock by using a special attachment for your Cricut machine. Under that we have score. So if you have the scoring wheel or the scoring stylus you could have your Cricut score this. So that means it's not going to cut all the way through your material but rather just leave a line. I usually just use score for when I'm making cards and I want to make nice folded crease lines. I usually don't use it for words. Under that we have deboss and engrave and again those are functions you'll probably use down the road and not right away. And then we have our print then cut option which is so much fun to use. So instead of having your Cricut cut out these letters it would print it first using your printer and then cut out your letters. So we're going to click back on operation and leave this as a basic cut because that will probably be the function you use most often. Now beside operation we've got a little color swatch button here. Chances are you don't want your project to be gray so you can click on that and choose any color you want. There's also an advanced option here so if you click on that plus sign you can choose any color you like or even put the hex code in of the color you're looking for. Below operation we have our font selection so you can choose any font you want. So at the top here we've got Cricut fonts now selected. So once again the ones with an A beside them are for Cricut Access members and if it doesn't have an A beside it it usually means that that font is free. Now this font here doesn't have an A beside it but it is not free it says $6.99. So this would be a specialty font and you would have to pay for this one regardless of whether you have Cricut Access or not but once again you can filter your fonts. So if you go up to the top to the right hand side you can click on this box here and you can click on free and then you can search through all these free fonts. You can also search the fonts by style so you can click on decorative and it'll show you a bunch of fun decorative fonts and you can also search by language as well and you can also search for the font by its name. If you go back to the top you can also click on system. System fonts are fonts that are already on your computer or fonts that you have uploaded to your computer. So if you wanted additional fonts that Cricut does not have you could upload your own fonts. So once they've been uploaded to your computer you can view them on Design Space and if you want to know more about that I do have a video on that as well and then once again if there's a font you use a lot of you can click on the little bookmark and then you can search through your bookmarked fonts as well and as you can tell I've never actually bookmarked a font before. I just did that right now so here is my first bookmarked font and if you can't remember the name of the last font you used you can also click on recent. This comes in handy when you've working on a project and you delete or change a font and you can't remember the last font you used you can come over here and look at the fonts you have recently used. Now I'm going to use my undo button because I want to go back to that Cricut Sans font so I can show you something. Beside our font type we have style and you'll see that it says regular so let's click on that drop down menu. For this particular font you can make the font bold, you can do bold italics, italics or you can click on writing. So you'll notice that when I clicked on writing our font got a whole lot thinner and also our operation changed from a basic cut to pen so that means our Cricut would draw out these letters rather than cut them out. Now all these styles aren't available for every single font, they're available to some of the Cricut fonts but not all of them. Sometimes it'll just be the regular option and that's all you have to work with. So I did change it back to regular but the pen is still selected so under operation I need to change that back to the basic cut. You can also change your font size right here, you can change your letter spacing so if you want these letters to be closer together or further apart you can use these arrow keys to make them close or further apart. And then we got line spacing so if you've typed out multiple lines of text you'll be able to change the spacing between your lines. And then we also have alignment so again if you add multiple lines of text you can make sure everything is aligned and beside alignment we also have curve which is a very simple and easy function to use. All you have to do is grab that dot and you can curve your text in either direction. And then we've got some advanced options here, you can ungroup your letters and what that does is make each letter its own layer. So if you go over to the right hand side this is your layers panel right here and it says layers and you'll notice we have two layers so we have the dog layer and the heart layer. So if I were to click on ungroup two letters each of those letters would now become their own layer so that means they're not together so you can move the letters around separately. But I'm going to undo this and put that back together. You can also ungroup your letters by going above the layers panel and clicking on ungroup. So now let's click on our heart and go up to the top and under operation we have basic cut. Once again you could change the color of your heart if you wanted to and beside that we have select all. So what that does is select every single layer on your page and if you look at the layers panel you'll notice that both those layers have turned green that means both of those layers are selected. When I unclick off of that nothing is selected and then if I click on dog you'll see in the layers panel just dog is selected. Another way to select everything is just by using your mouse clicking down your button and dragging over your layers and selecting everything and again you'll notice in the layers panel that both those layers are selected. To deselect everything you can either click off or go back up to the top and click on deselect. So let's select our heart again and beside that we have a function that says edit. This right here allows us to cut, copy, paste, duplicate and delete. I usually like using the shortcuts for this so if you select your heart you can do command c if you're using a mac computer and then click on command v and you've duplicated your heart. And to get rid of that you can just click on delete on your keyboard rather than going up to edit and click on delete. So you can do it either way. Another way to delete things is by going over to the layers panel and clicking on the little garbage can there and our heart is now deleted. I want my heart back so I'm going to click on the undo button. Beside edit we have a button that says align so because I only have one object here selected it is grayed out. I can't use it. So let's select both the heart and our dog layer. So we're going to select both of those. You can go to align now and now you can center these so that they will be perfectly centered. So you can do center vertically and that just brought the word dog down a little bit so that these are perfectly centered. I actually use the align feature quite a bit when I want to arrange things a certain way on my designs. And beside align we have arrange. So this lets you bring your layers forward or back. So I have the heart selected here. If I click on bring forward you'll notice in the layers panel that heart just went up to the top and now my heart would go over top of the dog. But if I wanted that dog layer to be brought to the front I can either click on that dog layer and go to arrange and bring to front or I could go over to my layers panel select the dog and drag it above the heart and now the word dog is in front of the heart. So that's two different ways you can arrange your layers. Beside arrange we have flip so you can always flip your image horizontal or vertically. I don't really want to do that with text so we're going to click on undo but if you had an image you wanted it in the opposite direction you could do that here. Offset is a really fun feature to use. I use it quite a bit and I explain this feature quite a bit in quite a few of my videos. What this does is make an additional layer behind the layer you already have. So you'll see a blue outline here around my heart and you can move this little toggle here towards the center and make that offset a little smaller or you can make it bigger. When you're happy with your offset layer you can click on apply. So now we've just created another layer. So you'll notice in our layers panel we have three different layers now. So behind this purple heart we now have a black heart and there's so many different uses for that feature. If you want to learn more about that feature let me know in the comments and I'll direct you towards the right video. A brand new feature in Design Space is next to that and that's called create sticker. So this feature allows you to create stickers very easily and it's a lot of fun to use but this is a feature only for those who have Cricut Access. Again I do have a video on this feature so I'm not going to dive too deep into this one. I'm going to click on my dog text now and click on warp. This once again is a Cricut Access feature but I'll quickly show it to you. So I'm going to click on check it out and this allows you to warp your text into different shapes and it's a lot of fun to use and you can explore playing around with that. And then besides warp we have size. So if you had a five inch notebook and you wanted a little four inch heart on that you could resize your heart here and do four inches and then make your heart smaller. There's also a lock feature at the top when I resize my heart it was locked but you could distort your heart as well. So if I clicked on unlock you can size the width and height right here by typing your width and height in or you can grab the corners of your image and push your image in or stretch it out and you can adjust the heart however you wanted it to be. We also have a rotate feature so if you wanted the word dog on an angle you could change that right here you could do 90 degrees then your dog word would be sideways. Then beside rotate we've got more and this just helps you arrange your images on your screen. I don't use it a whole lot but let's say you wanted this heart right here in the corner you wanted it at the one inch mark but you weren't able to get it there precisely using your mouse you could go over here and under x do one and then under y you could do the one and then it would be exactly in the position you wanted it to be. Now you'll notice that my screen has a lot of grid lines on there and sometimes they may feel like they're interfering with your work and they're driving you nuts a little bit so you can get rid of those. So in between these two rulers here there's a little square there click on that and then your lines are gone and you can work with a blank screen if you find that easier to work with. If you click on that square again you'll have your grid lines back so these are our one inch grid lines and you click on it again and our grid lines are smaller. Another thing that you can do to help you visualize or help you while you're designing is change the color of your canvas. So if you go down below the layers panel and click on blank canvas you can go back up to color and you can change the color of your screen and now our screen is blue. I know some people don't like working with a white background so this may be beneficial to you by being able to change that or if you're using a really light color or white color text and you're having a hard time seeing that on your screen you can simply change your background color. So now let's take a look at our layers panel so we've already kind of gone over these already so we have our ungroup button we've got our duplicate button and our delete button. Above that we have color sync so let's click on that. So over here what you can do is let's say you wanted the word dog to also be black so you could grab that dog layer and drag it up to the black and that would just change the same color as that. I don't use color sync very often but sometimes it does come in handy. So let's click back on layers and this time we're going to go all the way to the bottom of the layers panel and you'll see a number of options here. We've got slice which is grayed out right now because you need to have two layers selected in order to use it. We've got combine, attach, flatten, and contour. So we're going to quickly go over these. I do have detailed videos about these but let's quickly go through them. So first let's look at the slice option. So I've got a heart here and I've got the word dog. We're going to put the word dog and shrink it down and put that inside of our heart. Now what slice does is kind of acts like a cookie cutter. So what we're going to do is select both the layers. So we're selecting the heart and the dog. We're going down and clicking on slice and it looks like nothing happened but if you look at our layers panel you'll notice we have an additional sliced layer. So let's pull these layers apart so you can see what happened. So we have dog and then we have our heart and here is the piece that cut out of our heart. So we're basically using the word dog here like a cookie cutter or a pair of scissors and we're cutting the word dog out of the heart and this would be like the leftover paper that we had after we cut the word dog out. So that's a really fun feature to use but there's another way to do the same thing. So let's undo this and let me show you. So I'm going to select both those layers again. This time we're going to go over to combine and we're going to click on subtract. So that just did the same thing without giving us the extra layers. If you look in the layers panel besides subtract we have an arrow there. So if you click on that arrow it'll show us our two layers. So we have that dog layer which has now been cut out of our heart and our heart layer and since we subtracted the word dog from our heart it now looks like the same it did when we used slice. The difference is this change is not permanent. So if I didn't want this anymore I could go back to combine and click on undo subtract and then I would be back to our original layers. I would have to change the word dog back to the color black again but we'd be back to our original. If you had used the slice feature and had saved your project and came back in you would not be able to undo that. You would have to start all over. So if we go back underneath combine you'll see there are other options as well. We have weld, unite, subtract, intersect, and exclude. Honestly I don't use intersect and exclude that much but if you want to learn more about those let me know in the comments. I used to use weld a whole lot but instead of using weld now I use unite. So weld and unite are basically the same thing just as slice and subtract are basically the same thing. So if I click on unite what that does is blend those two layers together. So I have that little piece of the g sticking out of the heart here and both those layers have become one layer but if you go over to the layers panel and click on that little arrow beside unite you'll see both of my layers there and if you didn't want that change once again you can go over to combine and click on undo unite. Now if we did this same thing selected both of those went to combine and clicked on weld we would get the same result. So if you go to the layers panel you'll see only one layer there's no arrow beside that so that is a permanent change. So if I were to save this project right now I would not be able to undo this and that's why I use unite instead of weld but since I just did that I can undo it by clicking the undo button. So those are just some fun features that you may or may not use. The next feature we have is attach you'll notice it's grayed out because I don't have anything selected. So right now I have this purple heart and the word dog and if I were to press make right now these would cut out separately and I'm going to show you what I mean. So let's click on make and because all of our images are set to basic cut that means they will cut out of the material that we put on our Cricut mat. So everything that we colored black would go on this first mat here you can move your images around your mat as well but you'll notice the heart and the word dog are separate from each other so they're not going to cut out side by side and you may want them to cut out side by side so I'm going to show you how to do that in a second. We also have a second mat down here so this is the mat that you would place your purple material on so if you're using purple cardstock you would put purple cardstock on your mat and have your heart cut out. So everything is arranged by colors so we're going to click cancel and I'm going to select the word dog and our black heart so we're going to select both of those together and I'm going to click on attach. Now if I go over and click on make we have both our black images still on that first mat but this time they move around together so they're going to cut out in this position on the mat. Depending on what you're making sometimes it doesn't matter if they're attached or not but sometimes it absolutely does so I'm going to click on cancel. Now let's say you want to attach this heart as well to the word dog we could do that but keep in mind it will all have to cut out on the same color they cannot be separate colors then so if I were to select all these layers here and then go to the bottom and click on attach everything would change to the same color because once they're attached they have to cut out together and not on separate mats so if we click on make you will see our image here and it would cut out all together so let's click on cancel. If you no longer want your images attached together you can detach them by going down to the bottom and clicking on detach so I detach that first heart and now we have to detach the second heart here. Next to attach we have a button that says flatten and this is what you're going to use for print then cut so I'm going to change this dog word back to black and I'm going to stick it right on top of my heart so now I'm going to select both of those layers and click on flatten and you'll see in the layers panel it now says flatten and it has changed those two separate layers into one layer it also says print then cut beside it and if you look by operation it also says print then cut there so if you were to click on make you'll see beside our mat it says print then cut and if you press continue you would have to send this image to your printer to have it printed out I'm going to click on cancel so your printer would print the heart and the dog out in the color you selected you put white paper in your printer and it would print this out then your Cricut would cut along the outside of the heart but it would not cut the word dog out because you have put these two layers together I know this can be really confusing there's so much information I'm giving you but if you really want to learn more about print than cut just let me know in the comments and I will help you out so let's click on cancel now I have one more feature to show you before we go and make a fun quick little project together at the bottom of the layers panel we have the word contour now because this heart here is a solid image we cannot contour this image so we're going to grab another image so we're going to go over to images I'm going to type in heart and let's select the second heart here I'm going to click on add to canvas and then view so now we have a new heart on our screen but what if you wanted this to be a solid heart with no negative space in the middle let me move this one out of the way here and then click on your black heart again go down to the bottom right and click on contour now you can click out these little pieces inside your heart or in this panel here on the right hand side you can click on each of these or you can click inside the heart it's up to you how you want to do it so I'm going to click all of these and you'll notice I've grayed out all those middle pieces but we have one piece that's not grayed out and that's the whole outline of the entire heart so now I'm going to click this x button and you'll notice our heart has been completely filled in now if you change your mind and don't want that you can fix that so go over and click on contour again let's say you wanted that middle piece cut out so let's click on that but we'll leave these other pieces still grayed out go ahead and click that x again and now we have a new heart design kind of looks like a ribbon it's a lot of fun I like using the contour feature especially for more complicated designs so that I can make them simpler so I've just shared a whole pile of information with you and I'm sure it's overwhelming so let's have some fun now and actually make a fun simple craft for a project today you'll need a blank acrylic keychain and I'll leave all my product links down below in the description of this video you'll also need some permanent vinyl and some transfer tape a weeding pen a squeegee and of course a Cricut mat so let's make our project the keychains that we're making are two inch in diameter so we're going to make our own little template so head over to shapes and select the circle now our circle is automatically two inches so we don't need to change the size I'm going to bring this over to the center of my screen and then under operation we're going to click on that drop down menu and go to the very bottom and select guide now this is a feature I didn't show you about earlier so basically what we just did is created our own template you will see that guide layer in our layers panel but if we were to make our design this circle would not show up you can go down to the bottom left of your screen and zoom in so that you could see your circle a little more clearly then what we're going to do is grab an image so go over to images and we're going to type in heart again go ahead and choose a heart that you like I'm going to grab this one right here and I'm going to add that to my canvas and click on view now I want this to be a solid heart so I'm going to go down to the bottom right and click on contour and you can either click inside the heart you can click this heart layer here or you can click on hide all contours and then click the x I'm going to make this heart smaller just by dragging it to make it smaller and you want to make it so that it will fit inside this circle so we're going to put this heart on one side of our keychain and then we're going to add some text to the other side of the keychain so click on text so it will bring up a text box and I'm just going to type out mom you can type out anything you want you could do dog mom since we're doing dogs earlier but I'm just going to do mom keep in mind if you have a really long word and you're trying to put that on a little two inch diameter circle that writing is going to be super super tiny and be almost impossible to read so when you're making something this small keep in mind how big your letters are and if it's even possible to weed out that design you'll see what I mean once we get this cut out and I'll show you how to weed this so let's go ahead and change the font of the word mom so under font we're gonna click that drop down menu and another thing you can do is actually move your font box anywhere on the screen that you want so if it's covering up your word just go ahead and move that over to the side and you can scroll through the fonts clicking on different ones to see what it looks like this font actually looks a little creepy I'm not going to use that let's find another one another thing to keep in mind is if you plan to cut out your fonts out of vinyl it's best to have a thicker font just because it does make the I'm going to select bfc inkly and that looks pretty good it looks like an easy font to weed out so we're going to keep that there we can place this over top of our circle to make sure it's the size that we want now it doesn't really matter what color your image is on the screen right now what matters is what color you put on your Cricut mat to be cut out but if you wanted to visualize this a little better you can change the color so we can select the heart go up to the top and maybe you want to do a purple heart and then you can click on your text and maybe we can make that black and then you can place your mom text over your heart and get an idea of what it would look like once we make our project too you could place your mom text on an angle it doesn't have to be straight so you could turn it on your screen to get an idea of what that would look like but you don't necessarily have to turn it on your screen because we're cutting it out and when you place it on your design that's when you determine how you place it down on the keychain so that looks pretty good so let's go ahead and click on make in the top right hand corner design space will ask you if you want to save your project at this point you can if you want but you don't have to i'm not going to save this right now so you'll notice we have two mats here so this is our first mat and this is where you would put your black vinyl down and then our second mat is where you would place your purple vinyl down now one little trick you could do if you wanted to is move this heart to the first mat so you could click on those three dots and click on move object and then click on that black mat and click confirm now both of your layers are on the same mat you'll notice that they're both the same color but what you could do is look where you placed that image on your mat and then line the vinyl up on your mat accordingly so you could put a piece of purple vinyl in the top left corner and then if you were to move the mom word over to the right hand side you could put a piece of black vinyl in that corner that way you only have to put one mat into your machine rather than cutting your heart exiting that putting your second mat in and then cutting out the word mom this just saves a little bit of time and it's a little hack for you to use so i'm going to do that today you'll notice if we click on that second mat there's nothing there anymore so don't worry about that so now you're going to click on continue at the bottom right hand corner and this is where you're going to select the material you're using so if you're cutting your material out of cardstock you would select cardstock if you were doing glitter iron on vinyl you would select that so these are actually bookmark settings that i have here if you click next to that there's popular these are just popular settings that people use if you don't see the material you're looking for what you can do is click on browse all materials and you can scroll through all the different materials that your Cricut machine can cut or you can go to the top and search so i can type in vinyl and here's a list of all the different types of vinyl and each of these have different cut settings if you want to learn how to make your own cut settings let me know in the comments and i'll send you in the right direction now Cricut calls their permanent vinyl premium outdoor vinyl so that's what i'm gonna select so if you're using Cricut material Cricut has all their material listed here so it's very easy to find the setting you're using if you're using a different brand of vinyl you may have to play around with your settings now usually a good place to start is the comparable Cricut product i love using tech wrap vinyl and the premium outdoor vinyl setting does work for their basic types of vinyl but if you're using something like holographic vinyl or glitter you would have to change the setting you'll notice that i do have this one booked marked because i do use this vinyl setting most often so once you've clicked on your setting you can click on done and if you realize you picked the wrong setting you can always go back up to base material and change your setting there underneath the base material setting it does say pressure normally the default setting is great to use however if you notice your blade is a little dull and it's not cutting as much as you want to you could add a little more pressure or maybe your blade is very sharp and it's cutting too far through your material you can select less pressure we're going to leave this on default and then under that we have load tools and materials so we have to put our materials on our mat then you're going to make sure your fine point blade is in your machine now this is a blade that comes with your machine so you shouldn't have to change anything if you're using pens in your project or a scoring wheel or other tools cricut would direct you of when to put those tools in your machine right under this setting so let's go load our mat and get this cut out start by peeling the plastic protective layer off your mat and then we're going to place our vinyl on our mat in the same position as it appears on your canvas on your computer screen so for my purple heart i'm actually going to do rainbow here in the top left hand corner and for our black text i'm going to put it over on the top right hand corner one of the tools i love using is my cricut brayer it really helps push down your vinyl onto the mat especially after your mat has started to lose some of its stickiness after continuous use slide your mat into your machine make sure the mat is going underneath the protective tabs at the side and then you're going to press the flashing button and then press the next flashing button to begin the cut your cricut will cut out your design and when it's finished design space will prompt you to unload your mat then go ahead and peel your vinyl back off your mat you'll be able to see the cut line of the heart on your vinyl and since we don't need all this vinyl i'm going to cut off the leftover so i can save this for another project like this then i'm going to grab my weeding pen this is my favorite weeding tool and i highly suggest getting one so just peel up the edge of the vinyl with the weeding pen and then peel back that excess vinyl then we're going to do the same thing with the text so peel back the vinyl and then weed it out for the text we also have some inside pieces that we need to weed out so you can do that with your weeding pen if you're having a hard time getting those little pieces out you can also grab some tweezers and pull those out i'm going to cut a piece of transfer tape off this roll of transfer tape you don't need a very big piece as the project we're doing today is very small then grab your keychain and you can peel off the protective film on one side of your keychain then you're going to grab your transfer tape and peel off the backing place your transfer tape on top of your vinyl with the sticky side down then go over top of it with the squeegee making sure that it is sticking down well and also if you have any bubbles try to push those out then peel off the backing and you're left with your heart stuck to the transfer tape we're gonna push that down on top of our keychain and again grab your squeegee and scrape it on there getting any bubbles out and then you can slowly peel back that transfer tape and your heart should be stuck on to your keychain then we're gonna do the same thing with our text and we're gonna stick it on the other side of the keychain you'll notice that the back side of my colorful vinyl is white and it's not colorful so often when you have colorful vinyl like this the backing of it will be white but if you're using a solid color vinyl so let's say you did have purple vinyl the back side of that vinyl should be purple as well the white does not look bad with this design but if you're looking for color definitely pick a solid color rather than do what i just did once you're done you can add your hardware to your keychain and you've just created a really sweet gift here is another keychain i did recently for this one i did two colors of vinyl on the same side rather than on different sides and i layered them on top of each other i hope you enjoyed this video today i know i shared a lot of information with you and you probably have a lot of questions so let me know what your questions are in the comments below and i will do my best to help you out i hope to see you on more crafting adventures