The other day I was poking around on my phone and decided to play with the stylus my Note 9 comes with. I rarely touch it. When I do use it, I use it for a long period of time and the Note 9’s stylus only holds a charge for 20-30 minutes. This can be aggravating when you’re using it to draw since you have to keep taking breaks to let it charge for a few minutes. Nevertheless, I was thinking about Fall, so I doodled out a pumpkin.
Now, I had a doodle on my phone, a ton of watercolor palettes sitting within eyesight of the couch I was sitting on and a new Cricut upstairs. After letting those 3 facts bounce around in my head for a minute, I came up with a plan and uploaded my sketch to Cricut. After shoving some watercolor paper into the machine, it drew out my pumpkin for me.
So far, the Cricut knife blade has been a disappointment. As I mentioned in my last post, I was taking my template idea back to the drawing board. Maybe I started with way too intricate of a design. Let’s start over with a random polka dot design.
I loaded my polka dot SVG into the software and pushed start. Right away it started the same stabbing motion and slowly started stabbing out my circles. So far what i’m noticing is that it’ll cut lines and slight curves with relative ease. Which, makes sense when you’re sliding a flat knife through a rigid material. Some turns will not be possible. I was hoping that it could at least cut a nice circle though or at least cut the first few layers quickly until it gets deeper into the material.
I’m finally ready to try out the new Cricut Maker Knife Blade. It’s been sitting next to the machine all week and I have some time to play with it.
The knife blade is made to dig in and cut thicker materials, like the 2 mm chipboard materials being sold. I went back to one of my never-started projects collection and grabbed a bag of cashmere scarves that I planned on dyeing at one point and I thought I’d make a template for that project. I wanted to use chipboard so I could use light-sensitive dyes. Even if the dye liquid bleeds into the material, UV rays wouldn’t be able to penetrate the board keeping the image sharp on the scarf.
In the past week, I had put together some files I wanted to use as a template. One of those templates was a Damask stencil we’ve probably all have seen a thousand times. If it can cut this out of the chipboard then I should be able to pretty much cut anything.
Didn’t I just said I wouldn’t get around to trying the Cricut Maker until all the cleaning I was doing was complete? Apparently, I’m a big liar because I had an hour before bedtime last night and I jumped right into unboxing the new machine.
One nice thing I noticed after opening the box is they gave you a few pieces of material to get you acquainted with the machine. Once you load the software you can do these simple test projects with the materials provided.
Speaking of software, I’d like to point out the new machine lets you use pretty much any device. I thought I had saw an iPad in their advertisements, but I didn’t realize you could use android as well. To get started, I just pulled out my android phone and told it to run the first project.
It’s a simple card and kinda cute. It demonstrated it could draw and cut the paper. Which, my old one did. What I did notice with the tools on this machine is that everything is much finer. The cutting blade actually cut fine angles and pieces without issue. The previous machines it was more of a needle tearing through the paper, which worked, but also caused problems if you did anything tiny.
Also the pens are finer. These are more like micron pens instead of fat markers which pretty much made the pens on the previous machine useless since they could only do large letters.
Last, you could test out cutting fabric to embellish the project, which was what I was most interested in. The sample fabric was basic quilting cotton and it cut 4 straight lines without a problem. I would’ve hoped for something slightly more impressive as a demonstration, but it did the job.
After browsing the marketplace for projects to cut, I realized there wasn’t much for me there. I’m well aware I’m not their typical demographic. So a market place of frilly items like doll clothes and lady hats isn’t going to provide much value to me. But I’m used to that. Generally, I prefer to design my own projects but it’s nice to know if I need party signs or random things that they are available.
