Cricut Design Studio - A Beginners 7 point Guide

So you have bought Cricut Design Studio software but do not know what to do next? Here are some basic points to help you get going.

1) Although the software gives you the fantastic advantage of being able to design with ALL cartridges that have been released, even ones you do not own, it does not allow you to cut them. If you want to cut out any of the designs you have made and you have used shapes or fonts from cartridges you do not own you will need to go out and get it/them.

2) You are not limited to just one cartridge per cutting. You can use letters and shapes from any cartridge and if you own it it will simply prompt you when to load in each cartridge when you are cutting it.

3) There is a function called Welding which allows you to connect letters and shapes into one image. Make sure you check the welding box after each letter or image you are ’sticking’ together. Interestingly welding will take away any scorelines from the image you create.

4) You can share designs amongst other cricut design studio users. If you are blocked for ideas there are other crafters that can send you some of theirs. Check out the Cricut website and the message boards there. There are links that will give you cut files you can download to your computer. You can then open them using Cricut design studio.

5) For updates to the software check the Cricut website regularly. That way bugs are fixed and up to date cartridge releases are available.

6) Before you make the cut when you preview it, you can see the cutting lines as they are in bold. If the image is solid color it has not been welded. This way if you missed the weld check box on one of the letters you can catch the mistake before you cut.

7) Layering is another design feature you can use on your work. However if you decide for example to make a shadow for your image you need to do the shadow in a new layer so that the image and the shadow are not cut out at the same time on the same paper. In the preview option users can choose whether layers show through to the one they are working on.

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