How to Engrave Acrylic and Metal with the Cricut Maker 3 Engraving Tool | Cricut Maker Series

if you want to use your qriket maker or your Cricut maker 3 to its fullest potential then you're in the right place my name is Alex vanover with DIY Alex and I'm so glad that you're here when I first got my qriket maker I was so excited about all the amazing things that only the qriket maker could make then I got immediately overwhelmed by quick swap housing how to use all the tools and what exactly they all did so in my qriket maker series my goal is to empower you to take full advantage of your qriket maker or your Cricut maker 3 by teaching you about all the tools and all the amazing things the qriket maker can do in this video I'm going to be focusing on how to engrave using your Cricut maker which can engrave both thin acrylic as well as thin metal so let's get into it so because engraving with the Cricut maker is so versatile we're actually going to do two different projects in this video and I'm going to show you how I'm going to set up both of them before we actually engrave them using the Cricut maker 3. now we're going to be engraving a sheet of acrylic as well as a metal bracelet because the engraving tool can be used both with acrylic and metal those are the two most common that I hear about I'm sure there are probably more materials that you can use it with but acrylic and metal are by far the most common so to get started the first thing I like to do is create templates for the projects themselves using the exact size of the blank we have so to do that I'm going to start by going to the basic shapes panel and I'm going to choose a square and for this Square I'm going to have it selected and click the unlock button so that I can change the size to the exact sheet of acrylic that I have and the sheet of acrylic I have is nine inches wide by actually 12 inches high but because I just want to use my 12 by 12 mat I'm going to put that it's 11 and a half inches high because technically your Cricut can only cut these a half inch border around all of your mats so I don't want to go higher than 11 and a half inches otherwise my Cricut is going to ask me to use my 12 by 24 mat and I don't want to do that I'm going to take this template that's now the correct size keep it selected and under operation I'm going to choose the color white just so that I can kind of get an idea for the size of the sheet then to set up the metal bracelet I'm going to be using I'm going to go back to the basic shapes panel and also choose a square here then with this Square I'm going to unlock it and then I'm going to type in the measurements and if you're going to be doing an impress art bracelet like I am I'm going to be using the skinnier bracelet you want to measure as precisely as you can so for the width I know that's going to be six inches wide but the height is actually going to only be 0.375 inches high which is very very thin and that's why it's so important to measure exactly so that you can get as close as possible to the actual size then once you have everything sized I like to change the color of this one to like a lighter gray so that I can distinguish between the two and they'll definitely end up on different mats next Once I have templates for both of my projects set up I'm going to start adding in the images that I want to use and you'll see the font that I'm going to be using for this project for both of them is a font called DTC brown sugar and if you guys are qriket access members I highly recommend using this font when it comes to engraving or writing fonts because the writing style is super cute it's very stylish but it's still very easy to read so for the bracelet because our project is so small I'm going to start by just adding some text on the bracelet and that's all I'm going to put on it so I'm going to click on the T for text and under font I'm going to search for DTC brown sugar and select this as our font then I'm going to click off of my text menu and I can go ahead and type my text in I'm just going to do something really simple because this is so small so I'm just going to say faith hope and love then I'm going to take this text and I'm going to start to resize it using the handle in the corner to fit on top of my bracelet and I'll get a little closer and do that more exactly here in just a second but the next important step that I need to take as I need to change the operation and the style of my writing so I'm going to keep that text box selected and under style I'm going to go from regular to writing and you'll see that it looks much thinner after we do that then I'm going to keep that text box selected and go up under operation and choose instead of pen I'm going to choose engrave and it's not going to look any different here on the canvas but it is going to detect the right tool because the Cricut maker can actually detect the correct tools when you put them in the machine so that's why the operation has to match now because this is such a thin bracelet I am going to resize this to be a little bit smaller that way we have a little bit more room on the top and bottom of our bracelet and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to select both by clicking and dragging a box over both of them and under the alignment menu I'm going to choose Center then with both of these still selected I am going to move my bracelet over to make it even here on the grid so it's at two inches over it looks like I need to center it about three inches in on the bracelet so the whole bracelet is about six inches wide and if I Center it on the three inch line that I know my text will be centered and I'm going to show you why I'm not going to attach the template to my text I'm going to place my text separately but like I said I'll show you that in the prepare screen and why I'm going to do it this way but now the bracelet is all set to go so next I'm going to go over to my piece of acrylic and we'll set this up for this project so for the sheet of acrylic first I'm going to go ahead and insert my image and I haven't said this yet so um one thing to keep in mind when you're looking for projects for Engraving is single line projects are typically going to look best now right after I say that I'm going to break that rule a little bit with the image I'm going to choose but you'll be able to see that it's not a single line project I still think it looks pretty and I still like it but overall I would recommend sticking with single line images and single line or writing fonts as much as you can when it comes to choosing images and text for Engraving so to find my image I'm going to go into the image library and instead of actually searching for my Search terms I'm going to use an exact Cricut design space code to find an image that I really like so in case you guys have never done this before you can paste a a unique image code into the search bar that always starts with a little pound sign and then it has the letter M and then it has just a unique code in the search bar and you'll see when I press enter that that's the only one that will come up and I really like doing this because sometimes it can save you if you have a certain image you know you want to use then you don't have to look through a bunch of Search terms but if you want to find something similar for your project some really helpful Search terms and qriket design space are Wildflower bouquet which is what this one is called or you can search for like single line flower or single line bouquet and you'll find lots of very similar images so once I have this one um selected I'll go ahead and click add to Canvas and then I can size this image for my piece of acrylic now keep in mind that I did shorten my piece of acrylic by about half an inch so there's a little more room here than what we're showing but I don't want it to go all the way to the very edge then with my image still selected remember I need to change that operation so I'm going to go over under operation and instead of basic cut I'm going to choose engrave and you can see that because my image is not a single line image it's now showing me an outline of the flowers and I still think that looks really pretty and I still really like it but if it was a single line image then you wouldn't see just outlines of the petals the petals would just be drawn in one single line if that makes any sense just a little Pro tip for you when it comes to searching for images for Engraving next I'm going to go ahead and click on the T for text and it's still set to DTC brown sugar which is great and next I'm going to type in a Bible verse that I really like to use especially if you are someone who struggles with anxiety I really like to use this Bible verse which is Psalm 1127 and I'm going to change it up a little bit so it makes sense here on my text but those who fear the lord have no fear of bad news their hearts whoops I can't type today their hearts are steadfast trusting the Lord so I like to put really inspirational types of verses and things like this on projects because I find it's always really helpful to look back on when the project is finished and then I'm gonna go ahead and keep my text box selected and under operation I'm going to change it from pen to engrave to make sure I don't forget that step and then I'm going to answer one last text box and I always like to put the verse underneath it so it's Psalm 112 7. and then I'm also going to keep this text box selected and change the operation to engrave then I can place it right underneath the bible verse I make this just a little bigger take up a little bit more space and I really like the way that everything looks so my next step is to attach all of these things together so that they cut in this exact order except I'm not going to attach the background template and again I'll show you why that is here on the next screen but I'm going to go ahead and hold down the shift key over in the layers panel once I have the first text box selected so that I can select all three items that I want to cut on the background of my acrylic and then choose attach and once we have everything attached and ready to go I am going to save my project since we're going to be doing two projects at once let me walk you through how to finish up the acrylic project and how to set that up on your mat and then when we're ready to engrave the bracelet we'll come back and I'll show you how to work with the metal and get everything all lined up so I'm going to go ahead and draw a box around these two and actually hide both of these layers by clicking the eyeballs and the layers panel that way we're only working with the pieces that we want in this project so I'm going to go ahead and click the green make it button and that will take us over to the repair screen now here is my secret trick to making sure that you always line up everything exactly where you want it so you don't waste any of your blanks because that is one of the biggest challenges of Engraving is to make sure that you are lining everything up exactly the way you want it to because if it looks off center it can just look not very good so I'm going to show you how to prevent that so first we have this mat with the template on it and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the template and since we can't move it up and down any further because we're going to hit this red border I'm just going to scoot the template over so that it sits right beside the one inch line and I'm going to get super close and make sure that it looks good and it's right on the one inch by one inch line and when I do it correctly that means that I know that I can line up the left hand side of my acrylic perfectly with the one inch by one inch line here on my mat so I know exactly where my acrylic is going to engrave but because I'm working with acrylic that is too thick to cut for my Cricut I can't actually keep that shape here so I'll show you what to do with that in just a moment but now you're going to go down to the second mat and get the actual design that you're working with and you're going to click on the little three dots in the upper left hand corner and click move object and we're going to click on that first matte and then choose confirm then what we're going to be able to do is move our design to fit exactly on this acrylic how we want it to so that it's going to engrave in just the right place we know exactly where to place our acrylic and we know exactly where the design is going to end up so that it's going to look absolutely perfect and so I'm just kind of looking at the distance between the bottom Edge and the top Edge and trying to center it the best that I can as well as on the left and on the right but I think that looks pretty good so like I said we can't keep the template here because we're not going to be cutting it so I'm going to select that template in the background I'm going to click on the three dots and I'm going to click hide selected so as long as we can remember that we need to line up our acrylic blank on the one inch by one inch line now we know exactly where our design is going to engrave and it's going to be straight every single time so then we'll click the green continue button to continue to the make it screen and here's where we'll select our cut setting and as you can see a lot of mine are grayed out and this is simply because the engraving tool only works with certain materials so you can't just choose any cut setting only certain cut settings are going to be available to us so I'm going to click on browse all materials and I'm going to search for acrylic here in my search bar and because I know I got this piece of acrylic from Michael's which I'll show you guys here in the overhead shot in just a minute I know that I'm working with two millimeter acrylic so I'm going to choose the acrylic thick two millimeter cut setting you can also choose this one of course if you have some thinner acrylic then we'll click on done and once our cut setting is chosen we'll move over to the Cricut Machine so I can show you how to engrave but I also want to show you this really helpful tip here in design space is that your design space is going to show you which quick swap tool you need for the engraving tool because they do sometimes look very similar it can be a little bit confusing so we're going to be looking for the tip that has number 41 along the bottom of it but don't worry I'll show you how to load that onto your quick swap housing and add that to your qriket machine here in just a second so first let's talk about how to prepare the engraving tool and then I'll show you how to prepare your qriket mat so I like to keep all of my tools stored in here in the drawer of my Cricut I got this 3D printed tool tray from Amazon which I'll link for you guys in the description below I love being able to keep all my tools right inside my Cricut maker because then I never lose them so any of the tools that have tips for the Cricut maker are belong in What's called the quick swap housing and what that means is that it has a plunger on the top that you can press down and that's how you're going to add all of the tips to the quick swap housing so you can use them in your Cricut maker so for this project we're going to be using number 41 which is the engraving tool you can see very slightly down there on the tip right there there is a number and each of the tools has this number so that you know exactly which tool is which and in order to add the quick swap housing onto the tip all you're going to do like I said is just press that plunger on the top top and then add your quick swap housing let the plunger go and your tool is ready to be used so anytime you're working with the quick swap housing or any other blade for that matter it's always going to go in your qriket's clamp B you can think of clamp B like B for blade and in order to add in the quick swap housing you're first going to open up plant B and then you want to put your fine point blade somewhere safe so that you don't lose it so I like to just put it here in the side of my machine then when you add your quick swap housing in to your clamp B you want to let the open gears section of the quick swap housing be in the back of your clamp so that it can kind of go in with these gold gears I know it's a little hard to see on my machine because you guys are straight overhead but the open gears always go in the back and then the plastic is always going to go in the front there is no need to remove this plastic I know that's kind of confusing for those of you who are beginners it just protects anything from getting tangled up while the tool is sometimes lifting and spinning and these gears are moving so you're just going to leave that plastic part in the front of your tool while fitting in the flat part against the back of clamp B then you can close it up and the quick swap housing is ready for Engraving so next up we need to prepare our mat for Engraving and first I want to give you guys a look at this acrylic sheet that I'm using because I did get it from Michael's the make Market brand is from Michael's and they have a bunch of different maker materials that you can find in your Cricut aisle if your Michael's has them and I know right now this acrylic looks really frosted and that's because it has a cover sheet over top of it making it look that way but I promise it is completely clear so that's a look at the acrylic that we're going to be using today and the first thing I want to do is use an X-Acto Knife to gently open up my piece of acrylic so that I can get it ready to add on to my mat and there's going to be a protective sheet on both sides of this acrylic so I suggest you only remove the protective sheet from the top of the acrylic not the side that's going to be facing down on your mat so I'm just going to use a weeding tool to lift up the protective sheet here in the corner and then I'll pull it off of the whole front of my acrylic sheet next up we need to get our mat ready and as you can see I'm using a purple strong grit mat for Engraving which I always recommend whenever it comes to working with engraving or anything thicker I always like to use my purple matte and I'm going to reinforce the edges using painters tape foreign [Applause] so remember the way that I lined up my acrylic along the one inch by one inch line here I'm going to do that exact same thing actually on the mat so that my machine engraves exactly where I want it to so I'm going to place my acrylic very carefully here along the one inch line here on my mat and then kind of drop it in place and before you press on it it is able to be moved somewhat so you can kind of manipulate it a little bit to get it exactly where you want it to be then when you're happy with the placement of your acrylic on your mat instead of putting your fingers all over the acrylic and causing a bunch of fingerprints I like to use my brayer tool to really um stick the acrylic down to the mat and then I'm going to reinforce it with some tape then when I do my painters tape I'm going to reinforce all four sides you don't want to put tape where your machine is going to be engraving though because that can mess up some of the pressure so make sure anywhere that you're placing your tape is not going to be where your engraving tool is trying to engrave your acrylic then after all four sides of the acrylic are reinforced on the mat I have one more really important step that you do not want to forget and that is to move all four of these white star wheels all the way to the right hand side it's really important that you do this because if the star wheels were to move over top of our acrylic they can create some lines and some divots in our acrylic and we definitely don't want that so do not forget to move your white star wheels then when you're ready you can place the um mat underneath the white Guides of your machine and press the flashing arrow button to insert your acrylic and your mat into your Cricut then after the machine it measures the mat it's going to go ahead and Flash the go button so that you can begin engraving now one thing to keep in mind is that engraving does take a little bit of time so you do want to be near your machine while this is working and sometimes the carriage will move all the way to the right hand side and the tool will kind of lift and spin while it's detecting to make sure you have the correct tool in your machine so if it pauses over there for a couple of moments before it starts engraving don't be worried that's totally normal so let's go ahead and engrave this project [Music] thank you [Music] then once the engraving is finished you can click on the unload button and now we can finish preparing our piece of acrylic so the first thing that I like to do is just take a paper towel and wipe off a lot of the dust that's created from engraving your acrylic you'll see that there's quite a bit of dust sitting on the surface of my design so I just like to take a soft paper towel and kind of wipe that over to the side and I might get on my mat but I can always clean it off no big deal then I'm gonna go ahead and peel off the tape along the edges and then once I get my acrylic off of my mat the last thing I need to do is peel off the protective layer along the back side and because the strong grip pad is so sticky I want to make sure to put my cover sheet back on while I'm not using it then I'm going to use my weeding tool and get the back a protective piece off of my acrylic and then we can see that our project is finished it's still a little bit Dusty so I might have to do a few additional wipes with my paper towel but overall I think this looks just so pretty it's a little bit hard to see with the camera but it looks so so nice in person I can't wait to display this on an easel um and use it for a piece of Home Decor you can also check out my other videos up in the corner of the screen of some other ways that you can engrave acrylic with your maker and some other things that you can do with it so now that we've finished the project with the acrylic let's go back to qriket design space and I'll show you how to set up a project to engrave a metal bracelet so now we're back in qriket design space and it's time to set up our bracelet project so I'm going to start by clicking and drawing a box around my whole acrylic project I'm going to group everything together and then I'm going to hide that group of items so that we no longer have it on our canvas then we're going to scroll down the layers panel and click on the eyeball to both of the items that we want here for our bracelet project and we're going to double check that the template is the correct size and that our words fit well onto the template then when we're ready we're going to go ahead and click the green make it button and that's going to take us here to the prep screen now one thing I learned about design space recently is that on some of the smaller objects you're not always going to have the three little dots that you're going to need to move those items so if that happens to you what you need to do is you need to zoom way in on your prepare screen and then if you zoom in enough you'll eventually get the option for the three little dots so keep that in mind if you're having trouble with finding these options that you can move mats or hide your object so when it comes to lining up your bracelet on the mat what I recommend is moving the bracelet over so that the top of the bracelet is right along the one inch mark and that the left side is actually touching the one inch Mark as well you want to get in really nice and close make sure everything is perfectly lined up so that your bracelet is sitting directly on the one inch line and the x-axis and the left hand side is touching the one inch mark on the y-axis now we need to go down to our engrave mat and we need to find our words and because these are even smaller it looks like we're going to have to zoom in even further to get the option for the three dots so then once we do we'll click on the three dots and click move object and move that object over to the mat where the template is and we'll click confirm and then we're going to take our words we need to line them up in the center of our bracelet now we did move the bracelet over the to the one inch Mark but it is exactly six inches wide so in order to line it up correctly I know that I need to be about three inches over from the left side of the bracelet which is right here so that means I need to Center my words around the four inch Mark and order to get everything nice and centered so not only do we want to be centered side to side but we will also want to try to be centered up and down as well but this is really tricky to do with something so small so I'm going to show you the blanks that I'm going to be using today but if you are newer at engraving you might want to try the bigger blanks first because they are a little bit easier to use but regardless using this template trick you can always get everything lined up just exactly how you want it to so then once you have your words where you want them you need to go ahead and click on that template click on the three dots and then click hide selected remember because we can't cut that metal so we need to make sure that that is hidden so the only operation beside our mat is engraved then when you have everything all lined up just so you can click on the green continue button and again we'll go back to the make it screen and choose one of the more limited cut setting options now I'm going to be using the impress art bracelet blanks which I'll show you here in just a moment and whenever I work with impress art blanks I like to use the aluminum sheet as my cut setting and that always works really well for me so I'm going to type in aluminum in my search bar here and we'll choose aluminum sheets then we'll click done and now we can head back over to our Cricut Machine we already have our engraving tool in clamp B and the star wheels are already moved over but if you need to see those instructions again you can back up this video to when I showed you how to do all the basic stuff when we engraved the acrylic and you're interested in engraving metal blanks with your Cricut maker then I highly recommend grabbing your blanks from impress art impress art is made for metal stamping which you can do manually but as far as I know all the blanks from press art actually do work with the qriket machines because they are thin enough to go under the machine's rollers and the bracelet that I'm going to be using today is from the essential bracelet kit and I'm going to show you how to finish this bracelet when we're done using this kit as well so I will link it for you in the description below if you want to give this a try yourself so setting up the engraving for our bracelet is going to be very similar to the way we set up for the acrylic first I'm going to remove the protective sheet over top of my strong grip purple mat [Applause] and then I'm going to place my bracelet at the one inch by one inch Mark now remember I need to have the top section lined up exactly with the one inch line and then I need to have the left hand side kind of grazing that one inch line as well so I'm going to turn it upside down so I can see that one inch line really well and make sure that it's exactly where I want it to be and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my brayer tool and I'm going to run over my bracelet a little bit to kind of help stick it in place now before we engrave it we do need to remove the blue protective sheet so again I'm just going to use my weeding tool just gently peel that off just the top and also very similar to the acrylic I always like to Anchor my projects down when I engrave so I'm just going to use some tape and I'm going to put some tape along the sides of the bracelet remember I want to keep the middle area clear to make sure that I'm not competing with the tape when it comes to my engraving tool so I'm just going to place a nice tight piece across one side then the other side so now that we already have our quick swap housing in our clamp beat and our star wheels moved all the way over to the right hand side all we need to do is insert our mat into our Cricut Machine and begin Engraving and before I press the Go Button I can see that the roll bar here is kind of covered in some acrylic dust from our last project so I am going to wipe off the area that I can see just to try to keep the area nice and clean so that I hopefully don't scratch anywhere on my metal bracelet now I'll press the Go Button to begin Engraving [Music] unload my mat and now I'll show you guys how to bend this bar into a bracelet first I need to take my little bar and flip it over and remove the protective covering from the back side and now you guys can see that my bracelet didn't turn out as perfectly as I hoped hopefully you can see that the engraving is a bit off center um I actually suspect this is probably an issue with Cricut design space because I'm pretty happy with how I place everything um but I'm not perfect and neither is design space so you guys can get the idea from seeing this project but either way whether you're happy with your results or not we still want to turn this into a bracelet so let me show you how you can do that using the essentials kit it does come with a small tube of enamel so if you want to turn your um engraving into something a little bit darker so that it it stands out a little bit better you can use the enamel to do that but I actually really like the way that the engraving looks on its own so I'm not going to be using that for this project now the way that you're going to bend this bracelet is you're going to use this um tool that was from the essential bracelet kit like I showed you you're going to insert the end of your bracelet into this side of the um bracelet tool and then you're just going to begin to bend your bracelet over like this and that's going to create kind of one half of that cuffed look then you're going to flip it over stick the other side into the side of the bracelet tool and bend until it reaches the other side and that was going to give it kind of that cuff shape and when you're finished it looks just like this now you also have this pair of pliers that you can utilize to kind of keep your bracelet in that perfect shape so if you get any spots that are flat you can kind of clamp it here in between these pliers and that will help to kind of um fix any of those flat spots so that everything is rounded but as you can see since I just did that with my fingers this aluminum is super soft so you don't have to worry about the bracelet cuff being too small because you can simply bend it to put it on and then re-bend it around your wrist as needed but overall I love working with these and press art blanks because it gives us so many different cool things that we can do using our Cricut makers and the engraving tool and you are looking for more inspiration and different ways to use use the Cricut engraving tool then you can head over to my blog diyalex.com blog for an entire article on different project ideas to use with the Cricut engraving tool if you learned something in this video then don't forget to give it a like and make sure you subscribe to DIY Alex for more videos a lot like this one every single week I love connecting with you on social media so if we're not already connected then please use the links down in the description below to find me on your favorite social media platforms all the hearts foreign [Music]

Channel: DIY Alex

Views: 224,350

Keywords: cricut, diy wedding, cricut maker, crafts, easy cricut craft, diy, diy alex, Cricut maker 3, Cricut crafts, beginner cricut craft, Alex Vanover, DIY Alex Vanover, Engrave Acrylic, acrylic, engraving acrylic, cricut engraving acrylic, cricut tutorial, acrylic blanks, cricut tutorials, cricut crafts, how to cricut, cricut maker tutorials, how to use my cricut maker, Cricut Maker 3 Engraving Tool, cricut design space, cricut maker projects, diy project

Id: 3F_odI_AwlA

Length: 32min 53sec (1973 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2023