Everything you need to know about Cricut Print then Cut (Planner Stickers, Tags, and More!)

hey everyone its Carlie Hall and today's tutorial will be a Cricut design space tutorial on how to use print then cut so if you haven't tried print then cut this video will hopefully help you along the way so that you are no longer intimidated by printing cut and break out the printer and actually print and then cut so if you're unfamiliar with print then cut what it is it's using images that you can print using your home printer or upload it to a printing service like Office Depot and then have your Cricut detect where the images are so then you can cut around the border perfectly so this works with images from Cricut design space uploaded SPG's or PNG s or really any image type even photos so you're not limited to just using Cricut images it will work with your own images as well so hopefully this tutorial will give you the foundation on working with any image type so we are going to start by using images in cricket's design space so we're going to click on this icon here and then under image sets we are going to search for makers going to make and then I'm going to use this first image set here and it is included with access so if you are an Access subscriber you can cut all of these images included in the cost of your subscription if you're not an access subscriber for this project it would be worth it to be a subscriber since I'm using so many images but you can still use these images and pay for them and then you'll have them in your images forever and you can cut them as many times as you want so I'm an access subscriber so I'm going to load up my canvas with a ton of images and I'm just going to click on a whole bunch of images that I think would make cute stickers so I'm just going to select a whole bunch and then I'm going to select insert images now if you're not an access subscriber you can still play around with these images you won't actually be charged until you go to cut them so I'm going to zoom out and I'm just going to highlight everything and shrink it down since I'm making small stickers and we're just going to move them off to the side one thing that you should know about printed cut is you do have a size limitation so I'm going to represent this size limitation with this rectangle so to make it a rectangle I'm going to click padlock and type in six point seven five by nine point two five this is the max size that you can cut for print then cut since print then cut right now is limited to just eight and a half by eleven material so even if you have a large format printer that can print twelve by twelve you can only use eight-and-a-half by eleven material right now so this will just represent our cut area I'm going to arrange this and send it to the back so that it goes all the way down to the bottom of my layers panel and then I'm going to start arranging my stickers on to my rectangle so you can resize these however big or small you want usually stickers are on one and a half inches two inches so again make them as big or as small as you'd like and then just stick them on to your rectangle so that you can take advantage of all of the space so here you'll just kind of want to nest them together so that you can take advantage of all of your paper we will be adding a bleed on to our images so don't get them too close but close enough to where you feel like you're not wasting any material and if you need to make more stickers you can hide this layer and then just make a copy of as many or as little that you need to fill your space so I just use my hot keys on my keyboard but you can also duplicate from the layers panel and I'm going to find my layer and unhide that again and just continue adding more stickers onto my sticker sheet once you're happy with all of your stickers you can delete any of the extra ones and you also no longer need this rectangle so if we were to cut this right now as it is right now Cricut things that we want to use material that are these colors so for example if I click make it Cricut thinks that we have 31 colors and we want to cut each individual layer and then manually layer them on top of each other we know that we don't want to do that so I'm going to teach you how to change it so that the Cricut also knows what we want to do but before we get into that I want to explain what Cricut will do when it sees a print that cut so for this image the Cricut will cut the outermost image but for this teacup for example it has this negative space inside so for printing cut it'll cut the outer most image and any negative space so anything where you can see the grid through it I think our cup handle open the scissors right there those are the ones that you would have little cuts inside of your design so I'm going to change one of each of those images so that I can compare them when we actually go to cut it so to do that I'm going to find the bottom layer and I'm going to choose contour please oom out we can see that there's two pieces of this image this outer cut and the inside cut so I'm going to say hi to all Conte contours and then X out and you'll see that it filled in that cut you can also change the colors of your stickers so instead of that brown color I can choose white and I'm going to leave this one just like it I'm just going to change it to white so that we have a good comparison so I'll change that to white and then we'll hide the contour of this one by clicking on that bottom layer and then saying hide all contours and zooming out so we can see we will lose the scissor handles if we do this so you don't really have the scissors anymore but that's okay I want to show you just the difference between having the outer most layer cut and what it looks like when the insides cut too to turn this image into a print think we have to do a couple of steps and this is honestly one of the most confusing principles in all of design space so I want to go over this kind of slow and if you already know in you're a pro then just fast-forward through this part so if I click on one of these images right now I want you to pay attention to the line type over here it says cut so like I was explaining Cricut thinks that we want to cut each one of these colors on a different material so if I was using cardstock I'd cut white cardstock blue cardstock so on and so forth so up here at the top it says the line type it's cut and there's no fill there's no fill because the fill is just the material so if you're cutting no printing you will see it no fill so no printing no fill now if you want to print and cut we're going to click flatten I'm going to fly them all together but I just want to explain this principle with one icon so you can see the difference now if I click this option here it shows up at the top line type cut and the fill is now print it also will indicate that on the layers panel so it will show cut and print so now every time you see any layer that says cut and print Cricut is assuming that you want to print that image so if there's ever a case where it's accidentally cut in print but you really just want to cut it now you know that you can change the fill type to no fill so if you just the reason it's not letting me do that on this one let me so right now it says cut and print now if I wanted to change this to just be a cut and this happens a lot when you upload your own images if you save them incorrectly you can click on your image and then up at the top change it from cut fill to no fill and it will change it back to a cut and now you're ready to cut it so you can do this all in one step too if you have a multi layer image you can just say no fill and now it'll cut it so again this is a really confusing principle this was a change that happened back in January of 2019 and I remember it took a long time for my brain to wrap around it that's why I remember the specific date as doing it changed but just remember you want to see cut when you're not printing and you want to see for it the cut when you're printing so now that we've got that principle kind of locked down if you don't that's okay once you get it it'll be clear as ice but we are going to print and cut all of these images all at once so instead of going through and flattening them one by one you can do that but then you'll need to attach everything together so let me just quickly show you the steps if you want to go one by one so now that I have everything flattened again this isn't the way that I recommend doing it but I want to explain my thought process as to why I recommend the way that I do it so I'm going to click make it Cricut will arrange these how it thinks it works best so you'll see that it no longer fits on one page so we're going to cancel out of that so if you want to fly in them all individually you just have to add one last step and click attach attach the function basically just holds it together on the mat where you have it on the canvas so now when I click make it everything is exactly where I had it on my campus so that is one option I'm gonna cancel out of this and go back and show you the way that I would recommend doing it so as you can see every single layer or every single image has its own layer with a printing cut so instead of doing it that way I'm going to detach this so I undid everything that I had done before with the flattening and attaching so this is what I would recommend doing from the start you've arranged all of your images and now you're going to highlight everything and in one action you're just going to choose flying now the Cricut ceases as a set of images that it's going to print and then it's going to cut around the outermost image and everywhere you can see negative space you will also see it cut so like this cup handle and those scissors between the sewing machine etc so now just in that one click I went from a cut a set of cut images to a ready-to-go sticker sheet so I'm going to save my progress and then click make it on this step you'll see that everything is held together exactly how I had it on my canvas and I'm good to go you'll also notice this black line you can't delete it but you also don't want to delete it because this is the line that the Cricut machine will actually read to determine where it's going to cut so the way that the sensor works is it senses light dark and then light to determine where your images are and that's why Cricut restricts you to that certain size parameter of six point seven five by nine point two five so it does need a margin so that it can go around and scan but that'll make your printing cut even more accurate so it is a light sensor it detects light and dark and that's how we'll get that accuracy so while you can't take up every last bit of material it's not that much wasted space and for the accuracy I'm okay with that and because then my cuts will be a little bit more precise than if I tried to take my image too big so if you're happy with how this looks you're going to continue on it'll connect your machine but before we can connect and cut we need to print our images so this button here will say send a printer it might take a couple of seconds but this window will pop up now I always add bleed to my stickers and I'm going to show you what bleed means by comparing two versions that one has bleed and one does it and to do that I'm going to use a system dialog when I toggle on this system dialog and then hit print and actually not printing anything it's actually just pulling up a new window so that I can determine the printer settings that I need with my computer if you don't see a window pop up you may need to minimize your screen and this may be behind your design space I'm going to save it as a PDF and I'm going to show you the difference between the bleed version and no bleed and I'm also going to save a version without the bleed so that you can see the difference so we're going to toggle off add bleed use system dialog and then print that to PDF okay so here are the two versions so this one has no bleed and the images look identical to what you saw in design space they're ready to go and when the Cricut cuts them it'll cut the outermost edge of your image with the believe turned on you get this extra border and I like to kind of say it's your protection so if the blade when you're cutting if it goes off a little bit you won't have any image that is just left with some awkward whitespace instead this border is a protection around your image so that the color goes all the way to the edge of your cut so I always recommend turning on the bleed and you'll see that this is why you don't want to put your image just too close because this is enough room but if you put your images too close to the bleed will bleed together but we'll cut this and we'll see how it turns out I think it'll be fine so I always turn on the bleed and then cut so before I cut from my home printer I kind of want to talk about what I just did i created PDFs from design space so I clicked send to printer my bleed turned on and I have used system dialogue right now I it shows that I'm printing to a printer but I'm actually not and if you're using a Windows computer you might even have the option here to print a PDF from your printer list but I'm on a Mac so I'm going to click print and then I have the option down here to save as a PDF so again if you're on a PC you may have the option here to save as a PDF but I can come down here and say save as PDF now when I save to PDF I can name this whatever I want so I'm gonna call it planner stickers and that'll save wherever I told it to save so I told it to save to my desktop so then when I come over here I have this PDF version of my planner stickers so I can just open that up and see my planner stickers now if I don't have a home printer and I want to print this to staples or office e-boat I can upload this version and print it to wherever I'd like so that's a really cool option if you don't have a printer you can upload this and have it professionally printed I'm not sure if you can get it printed on sticker paper but you can print it on photo paper and run it two rows I run and add some adhesive so there's lots of options if you do not have a home printer since I have a printer I am going to print it to my home printer but before I just click send a printer and send it off I want to talk about your printer settings so I'm going to use my wide format Canon printer which I'll show you in this video I'm going to add bleed and I'm going to use the system dialog the system dialog is super important to tell your printer what type of paper you're using the quality that you want to print and so many other things so definitely always train yourself to turn this on and then click print as a reminder it will not start printing so you're actually just opening your settings this is a little bit confusing to see the word print now you'll see I have my printer selected as my wide format Canon and I have a couple of options I can feed from the rear tray all these different trays and they will look different for whatever printer you have I also want it to be set to photo paper the reason I wanted to be photo paper and you can adjust this based on your own printer is because sticker paper is a little bit thicker so I want my feeders to kind of ridin up so that they can accommodate for my thicker paper and then I'm also going to toggle it up to best so that I can get the best quality print you can take a look at all the other settings to see if there's anything else you want to change for me I just want to change my media from regular paper to photo paper and then boost up my quality to best then before you hit print make sure to load in your paper and then press print all right sorry how my prints are all set up ready to go I will link to the printer that I have in my video description and I will also link to this star craft mat inkjet printable vinyl so now that it's ready to go I'm going to hit print from my computer our print is complete and you can see just how cute it is it looks like I need to clean my print heads a little bit of ink but that won't affect our cut so now we'll load these into our Cricut machine and cut them before I cut my design I'm going to apply this matte UV laminate this is a completely optional step but it will protect my design and just make it last a little bit longer so I'm gonna add this I grabbed a sheet of it and I'm just going to peel back the edge so that some of the adhesive is revealed and then I'm gonna bend back the paper like this once I have it bent back I'm just going to stick it on to the top of my design and smooth it out you don't have to use a squeegee for this but it will make it super smooth you can flip back and slowly work down your design you'll want to make sure that your ink is completely dry and then you'll just smooth it out all the way across your design all right so here are the stickers with the UV laminate and this will just repel water in dirt so that the stickers hold up a little bit better so now we can cut it using our Cricut machine to determine my cut settings since I'm using Star Craft vinyl I went to at 6:51 vinyls cut and press settings and if you scroll down you can find the Starcraft inkjet printable vinyl with laminate for the cut settings I'll put a link in my video's description so you can find this if you are using the same product as me so I am going to set it to light cardstock and cut it twice in design space you'll say that you've already printed and connect to your machine if you're using a Explorer machine turn your dial to custom and then you'll be able to choose browse all materials for my maker users just click browse all materials now before I tell you how to set it to cardstock I'm going to actually show you how to set up your own custom setting so down at the bottom there is this little button here it doesn't look like a button but you can click on it now we're going to find light cardstock first so we're going to scroll down to the elves and find light cardstock so light cardstock is 238 so we'll remember that and then scroll all the way down to the bottom and click add new material we're going to call it Star Craft printable vinyl with laminate and then click Save now we're going to scroll this over to 2:38 double cut it like the settings recommend and then click Save down at the bottom click done now we're going to browse all materials again and we're going to search for Starcraft so now we can find Starcraft click on that and if we want to make it a favorite we can even star it so that's in our favorites then we'll load our tools and get started we're going to load our sticker paper and laminate on to our mat and you actually don't have to be super fussy about this part because the Cricut will read this black line that we have here so they'll load our materials into the machine and then click the flashing see right now the cricket maker is looking for that black line and determining where that mark is so it knows where to cut the stickers after it scans everything it'll start finalizing and then it will start cutting you'll notice that the cricket maker does one pass and then it will come back and do another pass once it's done cutting you can unload your mat close up your machine you don't need that anymore and then I like to flip my mat over to peel off any of my materials so I just push my material into the surface I'm working on and then back my mat so now I have my sticker sheet peeled off my mat and we can just bend back corner and you can see that we have a sticker okay that is so cute so here's our sticker and I'm just gonna load it this little notebook up so you can see but it's really good quality it has that UV laminate on it so it just feels like a really well-made sticker I'll put a couple more on here so you can see so now let's talk about the different contour methods that we did in design space so the cup is the one that we contour differently so we'll peel off this bottom one first you can see that they handle the inside right here is cut out so you could see my finger through it then we have the contoured version where the handle is not cut out so that's what contouring does and I'll show you the other rather be crafting one too okay so here is the version of the sticker that we cut through so we didn't contour it and you can see that it cuts out that negative space whereas this version here is the contoured version and you can see that the scissors are filled in there when you cut stickers it does a kiss cut so that you could peel them off the backing and your stickers all are still on at that sheet so again you can see the bleed where that sewing machine was the bleed is still around it which gives it a nice finished look around the edges of your sticker so it doesn't have any white areas which is why I always turn on my bleed when I'm printing anything that is going to be cut with print then cut the color really goes to the edge of my sticker and you can kind of catch the shimmer of that UV laminate - it's really pretty and honestly I can't believe that those little spines cut they're not really sticking down it's probably a little bit too thin but overall I'm super impressed with the stark rock printable materials that I've used so here's another look at all the stickers alright there were a couple of things that I wanted to go over that I forgot to mention but if you feel like you got everything you needed in this tutorial feel free to head out I won't be offended but if you still want to learn more about printing kites stick around because I have a couple more tips and tricks the one thing if you upload this file to be printed at a Staples or an office depot type place make sure that you don't make any adjustments so save it close it out and then when your print arrives and then reopen it but just make sure you don't make any changes because as you saw those images need to be in the same place for your Cricut to cut where it is so save it start a new project if you need to but just make sure that you don't make any changes all right so that's on the print and cut stickers for really any sticker purpose you can turn anything into a sticker it's really easy the other thing I want to talk to you talked to you about was the negative space inside a design so one of the common problems I see and I'll grab an image to represent this let's grab just a plain old circle outline so imagine this was a tumbler shape or some type of instructions on how to wash and dry the shirts that you're making your customers when you add your directions to it let's Center everything so you add your directions to it and then you flatten it and what you hope to happen is that everything prints and then it just cuts around the edge but what actually happens is the crickets going to cutter on the edge but then it's also going to cut all of the letters individually because you can see that grid behind it so we're going to undo that because that's not what you want okay so he undid what that we undid it and now I'm going to make a copy of my circle and using the same principles that we learned first our stickers we're going to use the contour function and if you don't have access to the contour function the reason is because it's a pretend cut so you won't have access to it so come up to the top check out your line type make sure it's cut and then no fail and then magically you'll have that contour option again so click contour choose hide all contours and then change it to white printers don't print white ink well most I should say most printers don't print white ink so when you have it turned to white even if I'm printing on purple cardstock it's not going to print anything so say I was printing on purple cardstock wherever there's white it'll actually just be purple okay so we're gonna arrange that to the back and then we're gonna align everything a center again and then we'll drop this down so now if we flatten it it'll just be a circle and it'll actually cut how you want it to be so it'll just cut that outermost perimeter and all of this is filled in now so it'll print nothing other than your directions one two three now say you wanted to add a hole to that because it's a hang tag and you want a hole in it the easiest way to do that is to attach a circle to the top but if you want it to look like these cute stickers over here we have to undo again and go back and add a circle which is totally fine so we can slice it out so that it slices out of both pieces or if you want to make things easy you can just slice it out of the white so I'm gonna do the easy way out and just slice it right out of the white and we'll just Center it on that white layer so I have my hole and then I'm going to slice it out of the white so I'm going to select the hole select the white circle by holding down shift I just selected this layer and then selected this layer and now I'm going to slice and it works kind of like a cookie cutter so there's my cookie cutter there's my cookie and I'm just going to delete both of those and send it to the back now when I fly in everything it's going to be a little bit hard to see but if we zoom in you'll notice that I can actually see through and there's negative space there so now my cricket will cut around at the edge and that little hole there so that's kind of what we did with those stickers too so if you're making a tumbler instruction sheet again some keys that I see a ton of questions on how do I print the color of the paper anything you want the color just to be the color of the paper just make your image white and then it won't print anything so if I wanted this whole thing to print white get on flat I could just delete my little circle out of there and then flatten so now I have my image and if I print it on white paper it would print just the directions but if I print it on say a light pink it would also just print black on my light pink paper so I hope that makes sense I know I'm throwing a lot at you but these are just some commonly asked questions that I get with print and cut so I wanted to address those in this video too if you have more questions on print and cut please leave them in the comments below and I will make additional printing cut videos since I know there's a lot you can add a writing layer so your Cricut writes on top of your print or foils on top of your print so the possibilities are really endless and I want to make sure that we cover all of the topics so that you feel well equipped to do anything print and cut so again make sure to leave all your questions in the comments below and I will answer them if you have other questions don't forget I have a full facebook group on cricut crafting so join my facebook group thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Karley Hall

Views: 450,503

Keywords: cricut explore air 2, cricut maker, cricut explore air 2 tutorials for beginners, cricut maker for beginners, cricut for beginners, advanced cricut projects, advanced cricut design space, print then cut, print and cut, print then cut cricut explore air 2, print then cut cricut maker, print then cut cricut, print then cut error cricut explore air 2, print then cut stickers cricut, print then cut vinyl, print then cut vinyl cricut maker, print then cut error cricut maker

Id: S_hH581tj6M

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020