Cricut Cutting Machine

Tools and Supplies

Cricut Maker 3

The circuit is a precise, but limited, cutting tool for paper, fabrics, and other flat materials. With a sharp knife, it is able to cut uploaded patterns onto the material of your choice, similar to having a printer print on paper of your choice.  The specifications for our model are:

• Cutting/Engraving Area: 12’’x12’’, or 305x305mm

• Max resolution: 144 DPI

• Max material thickness: 3/32’’, or 2.4mm

Blades

Knife Blade Tip: Used for cutting materials like matboard, balsa wood, tooling leather, and craft foam. 

Scoring Wheel Tip: Used for making smooth creases in materials like wrapping paper, cardstock, cardboard, and foil paper for easy folding.

Engraving Tip: Used for engraving materials like acrylic, aluminum, leather, and copper.

Rotary Blade Tip: Used for cutting fabrics like cotton, nylon, khaki, denim, and canvas. 

Supplies

We maintain a very limited supply of paper and cardstock for you to use to test your designs.  Here are some sources for stock you may wish to purchase:

• Cricut Materials for the Maker (Cricut site)

• Cricut Materials (Michaels)

Availability 

The Cricut is available for use in Design Lab 1 during open hours.  Ask the DMC Fellow on site for assistance or find it in the yellow cabinet shared with the button maker. 

Plan Ahead!

Review our Cricut User Guide

We don't require training to use the Cricut, but we strongly recommend you budget an hour or so to figure it out.  Our user guide will help,  from navigating the software to choosing a blade and material, to loading your first piece -- and we'd love to help you in person.   Just ask whoever's staffing the Lab for advice.  

Practice with our Name Tag Project

For those who learn best by doing.  

Design it!

Using Cricut Design Space:  Cricut's proprietary software to run the Cricut and make designs can be downloaded for free here.  

Using design software:  use your software of choice to design an image and import it into Cricut Design Space as a .jpg, .gif, .png, .heic, .bmp, .svg, or .dxf file. 

Make it!

You will need either your phone or laptop to use the Cricut, as that's where the software is. For laptops, we provide the cable that connects it to the Cricut. Bluetooth connection is available as well (this is what you'd be using for phones) but is a bit more finicky.