How to Use Cricut Design Space in 2024 on Desktop or Laptop! (Cricut Kickoff Lesson 3)

hello everyone my name is Jennifer maker and today I'm teaching about Cricut design space for desktop and laptop with the most recent updates this is the Cricut kickoff lesson three and we're going to go over the primary functions of the latest version of Cricut design space so you feel more comfortable in the software and then we will create something fun together so please pull up a chair in my studio or if you've been taking all my Cricut kickoff lessons I have your chair saved for you so let's get started all right in cricet kickoff lesson one we downloaded and installed the free Cricut designspace app from cricket.com setup we created a Cricut ID or signed in with the one that we had we did our test cut in Cricut kickoff lesson two we went um over all the tools materials supplies that you can use with your Cricut if you need links to those videos to watch first which I recommend make sure you've watched those before tonight before today's video um you can find them at Cricket kickoff.com today we'll dive into design space itself and see how it all works now before we get too far I want to remind you about my free and updated Cricut kickoff principal handbook let me just show it to you as I tell you about it uh the Cricut kickoff handbook goes along with all of these lessons you can download it right now at Cricut kickoff.com just register for the class which is free and you'll get the handbook I'll be referring to it as go along during today's lesson but a little sneak peek is this awesome map that we made that has every single thing on the canvas marked so if you and also like little cheats about what things do this is a great thing to just put near your computer as you're working and then if you can't quite remember where that thing was uh it's probably on this page also our project the stepbystep instructions are all in here tons of other stuff that's awesome in here but those in particular I stuck it to my mat are um important and I just want to call your attention to them okay so forgive me my voice is getting a little bit sore so I will be drinking tea during today's class all right so Cricut design space is the free companion app to your Cricut cutting machine design space or DS as some will call it let you design and cut with your Cricut you can create projects from scratch you can use one of Cricket's images or upload your own images or you know some of some other ones some other designers images like my images and again this is free software so even if you don't currently have a Cricut you can download this software free and play around with it first which I highly recommend so let's go ahead into to the design space app on my computer here so you can see what it looks like is that is that it there we go it just took a minute uh so here is Cricut design space I have a um multicamera view for you and I am using my Mac and so on one screen we've got um on the right we've got Cricut design space itself you can see my cursor moving around there and then we've also got a camera on the cricket maker 3 a camera on me and a camera on my keyboard so you can see what I press if that's helpful to you all right now I am using the Mac because that's what I do my live streams from but the desktop um design space for desktop looks the same on Mac and windows with only one change and or one difference and I will show that to you when we get to that point I have my Windows laptop here too so current system requirements for Cricut design space on windows are to have window Windows 10 or later at least 4 G gab or more of RAM and at least 2 GB of free disk space on the Mac you need to be running OS 11 or later have at least 4 gigb of RAM and 2 gbt of free space if you find that cricet design space seems really slow the likely culprit is your computer CPU memory or available hard drive space Cricut design space is very fast for me and I have virtually no problems with it ever if you are following along with my unboxing videos in December I unboxed a $150 Windows laptop so we could try it out and see how it worked it was a great price but it was very slow nothing like what I experience when I use it so I just want everyone to keep that in mind if you are having issues with Cricut design space look first at your computer okay so here we are in Cricut design space again this is Cricut design space for desktop if you're looking for iPad or Android I have different classes on those okay so I want to give you a tour of this so uh this is the home screen this is what you see when you first log in and uh we're just going to go across the top the top there's a tab at the top called home and there's one called the canvas whenever you need to move between the home screen and the canvas you just click up here super easy over here on the right side is a back with in my case it's got a little red bubble and some numbers this is your notifications menu if I open this I will see that people have started following me and or liked some project of mine and uh if you would like to follow me which you're more than welcome to do everyone can you know there are privacy fact if I open this up um you can set your own privacy I don't want it to do that but this little icon right here this little gear icon that will allow you to change your preferences for your own privacy so that you know okay so you don't have to be visible people don't have to follow you and you don't have to see every notification I like the notifications anyways if you want to follow me you can go to uh jennifermaker.com slf me on Cricket I put it right onto the bottom of the screen here uh there's dashes in between the words but that will take you to my profile on Cricut design space which if you would like to see is under this menu right here at the top um which is the next one over so we'll just hop on over there so if I click on the picture of myself and so for you that's either the picture of you or your initial if there's no picture or actually I don't think it's a picture or an initial if you haven't put in a picture I think it's just like a little gray circle with a little pretend person in it or something like that anyways this is your account menu up here and if I click on this I can go to my profile and this is the profile that you would see and this is where you would see like a follow button these are my projects here if you want to look at them um you're welcome to make them too of course um but so everyone can have a profile if you want it it's completely up to you and then also under here um are your notifications so if you want to go look at your notifications settings which which is a very important menu let's open up that one I guess it's going to ask me to replace it that's fine we can handle it okay design space settings so there are several tabs across the top don't um Overlook that so to start with we I mean there's a lot of settings for desktop you can change your country of origin um I don't even know why that matters there must be some reason maybe someone knows but I'm not sure this is a new one for me your language of of course that matters uh your saving your preference for for saving offline are right here which uh application you're using I'm currently on live but everyone if they want can change to Beta which gives you early access to new features that are coming down the pike um the subscription your subscription if you have one to Cricket access which I'll talk about in a moment um there's a little notification here about when it's going to renew mine is going to renew today no mine today and it's going to renew in a year um I remember why I someone had a question about switching from monthly to annual so I went and I created a new subscription that day it was right after it was right during Cricut kickoff like a couple years ago uh anyway so if you have if if you have a Cricut access subscription which you don't have to have that's here and then your version of Cricut design spaces listed here you can always check for updates here and you can always see what's new since the last time you were in with the what's new link right here okay going to the next tab we have machines new product setup is what we did in um Cricut kickoff lesson one so if you have a new machine you can just come here and set it up or you can always come back here to redo it update firmware this is um if you want to check that your firmware is up to date at any time you can do this I know that you'll ask me if you need to and know if you need to have your firmware up to date Cricut design space will Force the update it'll just update it but you can if you want to check it manually you can or update it manually you can do that here machine calibration so you can calibrate your machine for best accuracy you would select your machine and follow the directions machine care um this is for the Venture The Venture which I have behind me here uh does need a little maintenance as we discussed in lesson one for the Venture custom material settings let's click on that and let's choose we have all of these crickets currently connected which is a lot so tonight we're going to focus on the maker 3 so let's choose the maker 3 so you can only uh look at the custom materials for a machine that's currently connected so that you're not confused by that that's why I was like well that's a long list because usually it's like one or two all right um anyways you select your machine and here you can modify your settings so if you every time you go to cut I don't know acetate it doesn't quite cut quite right it's never quite quite enough you can actually go into acetate right here click on the edit button and you can change the pressure you can see it's actually Max I have messed with my settings a lot I don't know if this is my change or not I never really know but you can you have choices and you get to customize your material settings I do it often you can also add a new material you scroll all the way to the bottom and choose add new material right here you can have all of the custom materials you want you can make thing just for this one particular paper that you like to use and this is the setting that works best for it and then you can choose that every single time you go to cut that paper for example so that's this is very powerful you can do this with all of the machines all of the Crickets and you can do this from desktop and you can also do it from the IOS app but desktop is really powerful okay so done all right uh let's go back I'm not finished in settings all right we were in machines okay linking cartridges I don't use cartridges they're from a byon age from before I ever used a Cricut but some of you might have cartridges that you'd like to link and you can click here to start that process there's settings for the canvas you can choose to have a full grid a partial Grid or no grid and you that'll make more sense when you see the canvas same for units you can have things in inches or you can have them in metric and you're you can change your um you can have it show your operation type or not show it in your layers panel uh load type you can choose this is all very specific I'm just gonna here's some more settings like if you are looking to set something cricet has been adding a lot of settings for a really personalized experience so if you set these things in advance it things go a little faster you get prompted less often for you know do you want to put it on the mat or not do you want this size or not you know especially for a prin thing cut if you're struggling and it's always giving you a tiny size you always have to keep changing it to the big size you can change it right here notifications you can choose all of the the things that you want to share activity about yourself members who follow you and um even information from cricket so you can opt in or opt out of everything and then the system this just tells you the system architecture and how much memory it's using I haven't even seen this screen before this is a new one for me oh this is good it's not using any virtual memory yay that's a good thing and physical memory is using just 35 whatever this looks good to me so this looks excellent all right so anyways these are your settings it's a lot of settings when I did the iPad and the Android earlier they were just tiny little settings so the the Cricut design space desktop app is more powerful by quite a bit as far as I'm concerned also Cricut design space for desktop is my preference this is where I prefer to do all of my designing and cutting is on my computer okay and then across the top here this is the name of your project actually let's go back to home well we're starting on home right so across the top here you can search right here you can search images projects fonts and profiles so you could also search for me here if you wanted to over here where it says it's a green button with a plus sign this is where you can start a new project if I click this right now well there was a project on my screen but if you have a project on your screen it should caution you not to let's try that again I was going to put in free shape I will explain what I'm doing let's go back to home and let's try new project there we go so this is what you would normally see if there was a project on your screen um it would tell you it would it would warn you that a project already exists on your canvas with unsaved changes I think my project was saved so that's why it's okay do you want to replace it so if you don't want to replace it click cancel if you don't mind replacing it go ahead and do um replace or you can of course save it too so that is how you would get to a new window all right going back to home let's go back to the Discover menu this is the Discover menu so there's a lot they have really updated their app a lot in the last year so down on the left side of the panel here this is this the Discover window all sorts of awesome projects things to inspire projects to discover all those things I highly recommend taking a walkth through of this screen to find awesome new fonts awesome new projects awesome new people there's a Cricut Community projects this is projects that people like us make and save to share with others so really really cool uh and you can always go right to your stuff click on that you'll see recent projects that I have been saving and working on all of my collections along the side collections are folders that um you can organize your projects into if you have a free account you get five free if you have Cricut access you get an unlimited number all right so discover my stuff get started is like you know Cricket learn educational resources I think what's that yes there's a little video here super cute video and now I have to get back there we go there's also the heat guide right here on the side the shop is here there's a navigation Tour all sorts of things I definitely recommend spending some time on this screen and really understanding it okay but where all the action happens is on your canvas so let's click on canvas so this is where you'll spend most of your time designing this is the canvas we have a nice big blank canvas here to start working in I'm going to put away my follow button so that you you can see all of the buttons that are available we've got button or options all the way across the top they're gray out right now gray Out means like a light gray so you can't really see them that means they're inactive so you can't click on these things and then that's along the top along the side we have more icons we can click on these these lead to other things and resources on the side the right side here this is our layers panel so once we have something on our canvas it will appear in a list here and uh we should really just dive in and start um Untitled project means it's brand new and then along the top over here we've got another link to my stuff if ever you're struggling to find your stuff it's linked everywhere and this in this one right here that says explore three this is the machine that is currently selected in Cricut design space we're going to focus on we're going to make our first project on the maker 3 so I'm actually going to switch that right now to Cricut maker 3 and this matters because if you've got you need the right machine selected so you can see the right features that are available for you all right so uh starting here and going on down the top so starting at the top left you have another plus button so if you wanted to start another new project you could click right here but I actually want to show you something and this is a great time to do it so one of the really cool features of cricet design space is the ability to have multiple windows open excuse me multiple windows open I don't know if a lot of you know how to do this I want to show you how so if I just click this I just get you know an another blank window which I already have it's not going to give me another one so but I personally have multiple windows with multiple projects going on at any one time so I'm going to show you how I do it on and I'm going to have to go to a wider view so that you can see it so my screen is going to look a little messy so but hang in there with me so I'm going to switch to this view this is the whole view of my desktop right now to get a new window on Cricut design space for desktop you go to file and you choose new window and there is a new window and you can see I actually have a lot of windows open right now okay so that's how you open up a new window let's go back here and hopefully it saved all my Chang is okay good and then I want to show you it's different this is the one thing I know that's different between um Mac and windows so I'm showing it to you so let's do an overhead so you can see just this we're going I need to zoom in a little bit more I think just a second and I know it's just it's just a um uh you know picture of my laptop but you'll get the idea so this is my Windows laptop so to open a new window on a Windows laptop you want to click on these three dots that you see up here click on that and there's file new window I'm going to hold this up so you can see it I want everyone to see how to open a new window on whatever whether you're using Mac or window because it's very powerful to be able to have multiple windows open you can be working on one and then go do and cut something else get something queued up often what I like to do is work on a project send it to my Cricut and then I just open up a new window and I just work in that window on my next project so I'm not wasting any time that's not an option on iPad or Android okay so back to our split screen okay bring my keyboard back all right so there's yet more options down here I don't want to overwhelm you but I also don't want to leave anything out so I'll try to do a brief overview of what these things are remember that there is the map in the cricket kickoff handbook right so if I mentioned something and you just can't remember what it is check out the map and that will help you understand what everything is okay so along the left we've got templates which are awesome for putting a template onto your your screen and then you can design around it so this is like an apron you can know hide and hide it show it uh projects are access to all those awesome projects you saw on the front page but you can search them and you can filter them there are currently 129,000 projects all searchable and you can filter by all of these awesome things so if you're looking for something look here and then use your your filter power to filter down remember to use good keywords too you know like use proper good Search terms um the shapes menu I use this all the time the shapes menu we use for getting shapes and the top we've got free shapes and below that we have shapes that are included in Cricut access and I think this is a great time to talk about Cricut access um because we haven't yet so if I go back to settings and I go to settings here and I mentioned that there was but this takes me to now I am a Cricut access subscriber if I click on this what happens oh it just takes me to it just takes me right to cricket.com so I can't really show it to you but I can show you some things about it let's go back to our Discover page because this is useful yes this is a great page here all right so and I'm going to tell you about Cricut access so Cricut access is an optional subscription plan that's on top of Cricut design space Cricut design space is free Cricut access is an additional cost there are products reserved just for Access subscribers there are um like if you see this little green flag with the a I'm pointing at right now that means that's a Cricut Access Project and you can make it without paying anything extra there's discounts there there's um like only people who have Cricut access can purchase the mystery box so there's special perks there's special um features inside design space there are premium features just for Cricut access none of the basic things that you need like here's here's the little thing about Cricut access none of the basic things that you need to do your projects but special things and they've been adding more like the ability to warp text or the editable images or unlim limited collections things like that but it's an optional subscription program so the benefits are there's like 600,000 images right now that you would get access to over a thousand so over 700 fonts and about 1,000 um editable projects and then plus you get discounts on licensed designs now licensed designs many of them are not included in Cricut access Cricut access isn't everything is free that's not what that is um but I would say most things are most things are included in that now a lot of people confuse Cricut access with design space but they are not the same cricet design space is the free software that you use to create or upload designs and cut them with your cricet all Cricut Joy explore Family Maker and Venture users need to download and use the free Cricut design space software it is required there's no other alternative you use Cricut design space but they do not need to pay for Cricut access unless they want to so most people ask me if I think Cricut access is worth it and I think it is if you will use it so basically the benefits are again that you get access to tons of images and new images are added weekly plus access to so many fonts including writing fonts which is the primary reason that I initially got an access account because I love having great writing fonts if you find that you're ever buying images or fonts from design space an access subscription pays for itself very quickly you also get faster member care like twice as fast because you get priority Support over those who don't have access you get a 10% savings on all product purchases on cricut.com machines accessories materials and more including sale items you also save 10% on premium licensed fonts images and ready to make projects from Brands like dis Disney because those things are not usually I don't think they're ever included in cricet Access cuz you know Disney another perk is exclusive discounts on products like the mystery boxes with Cricut Cuties there's a lot to talk about with Cricut access and you know I'm going to move on from this but I if you want to learn more go to jennifermaker.com ccricket access to see the list of the perks and a bunch of other answers to questions I get now I have Cricut access I have my own subscription and a general reminder to anybody who's watching this and doesn't know I don't work for Cricket Cricut doesn't pay for my Cricut access Cricket doesn't pay for my machines I pay for these myself so this is this is the way I like to do it this is my preference Cricket is very generous and constantly offers which than you Cricut but I like to buy all my own things so that I always understand the value of what it is and so that I can pass on an honest opinion of that to you okay so just sometime as I'm talking about Cricut access I'm like oh man I sound so official but I'm not I'm not official Cricket anything I'm unofficial Cricket all right so um I have Cricut access so that means I have access to a lot of images and fonts you may or may not have right so I have access right you can tell if something is included in Access when you see this small green flag so see on this front page all these green flags these are all Cricut access um part of Cricut access right um and this flag identifies the item as one that's included with a Cricut access subscription if you have a Cricut access subscription um instead of including a price it see how it said it'll have it'll say it's like it says it would have normally cost 99 Cents but instead it's C it's gray and crossed out okay so it'll just say that so that you're not confused all right so that's cricet access all right let's go back to our canvas and continue on all right we're on the shapes menu there are these shapes down here that you can get if you have criced access honestly I usually just use free shapes they're just fine so I'm going to click on a heart you just click on it and it just automatically adds to your canvas let's zoom in a little bit more that looks really far away by the way you can use keyboard commands to get right into your if you do it like on the Mac command one it zooms in it's really awesome so if you're ever struggling with your like just like you saw me right now it kind of like was somewhere weird you can um zoom in with command one on the window on Windows La computers it's control one all right so there's our shape yay we have a heart so shapes are really useful I use them all the time for Designing and just really for lots of things so you're going to get really familiar with the shapes menu but below shapes we have images this gives you access to the 600,000 images that are included or part of Cricut um so if you are not a Cricut access member you can purchase images whether if they're not free um you can search on them so let's search for one right now let's say star so search for stars there are 15,000 stars now these are all stars but you can filter things right here here so I could say that I'm interested in just free stars so let's just click free right here at the top and that gives me 32 stars and these stars are all free to use I do want to note that free to use currently does not mean free to use forever so there will be some shapes that will be free you or images that are I've never seen them for sale they've always been free but there's no guarantees so if you see something free and you want to make it you don't have a Cricut access account make it right away don't assume that it'll be free next week There's free items coming in and out of free Freedom all the time so that you get the chance to try things but just because you grabbed it while it's free doesn't mean that it remains free okay but lots and lots of all these these are all um ways that you can search for content for images all right next one is text so when I click on text it will put a text box on the screen we're now zoomed in really far let's do that again because I was impatient and did it twice all right all right when we click on text it will put a text bar U window on the screen and it's still I'm just zoomed in too far I think let's zoom out a little bit and I'm going to delete all of that and I'm going to try to do it at a reasonable size here okay we'll we'll stay right here okay when you click on text a text box appears on the screen it looks like this by default the word text and um it's highlighted already I can right now just start typing so I can put in my name and it will immediately put that text in what I see happen and then you can actually click somewhere else on the canvas to exit the editing mode and now this is just in selection mode so see they're both still this is when you see the Box show up around them that means selected that's pretty normal on a com you know a computer or device but um if you need to get back to edit your text you just double click on it and there we go see that highlight shows up again and you can actually put your cursor you know where you want it to go you know if you or you can move with your cursor keys and you can move in and out along your your name and you can type more you can use the return key that's the first thing that came to mind this is a better one it's funny I am tired this is like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine 10 11 TW my 12th live class in three days okay this is also the last one so anyways I am happy because we are making awesome things together so this is this is text we'll talk more about text when we do our personalized project but um I also want to I'm going to move this down and I'm going to focus on our shape I'm going to get in there let's get in there nice and big maybe a little bit smaller okay so this heart I want you to see this box that shows up around it when I click on it when I select it with my mouse right and I'm just clicking on it right this is called the bounding box and this box shows the boundary of it bounding box right but it also has cool things about it one is that when it's selected it will show you the size of your object so in this case we've got 2 in by 177 in so um that's nice to know like whenever you need to know the size the size does appear in another spot up here which we'll talk about in a little bit but it is up there and you can also use these Corners that you see here these little handles they look like little boxes in the corner you can use them to change the size of any layer so if I click hold and drag in or out it changes the size the same thing works for the text uh I need to zoom out a little bit though it's very large so see I can make it smaller and bigger we'll put this over here um so you can use those to resize things really easily you can also use um you can also do um a rotate so if you just click on the corner and I'm going to zoom in again a little bit I want to make sure you really see what I'm doing here so no I don't want to move that over Let's uh move my screen over a little bit where did my menu bar go I'm using my keyboard right now you don't have to remember how to do this but if you I'm using my mouse and my can you see my mouse oh I can't get my mouse out enough there's my oh I can't it doesn't reach it's down here really low I'm using my mouse wheel right now to move my canvas up and down like this um and if you hold down was it the shift key you can actually use the mouse wheel to scroll it back and forth so see I'm holding down the shift key right here I presume it works with this sh shift key too I have a whole sheet of keyboard shortcuts if you are interested um I think that we put them on our Facebook page okay anyways so you can resize with any of the corners doesn't have to be just that one corner all the corners will resize and also all the corners can rotate so if you move your cursor a little bit past you'll see it change to a curved circle with arrows and then you can just click drag and hold and it will rotate for you and if you hold down the shift key on your keyboard it rotates a nice little increment so if you want to get that perfect 90 degrees you just have to hold down the shift key all right so this is a little and this works for all the layers that you might have whether it's text or a shape or some fancy image that you found or anything like that okay phrases continue on with our tour phrases is um a subset of the database that allows you to um search for phrases so those of you who like to make t-shirts and mod with you know cute things like this is my emotional support blanket or hey baby you can just gave me a look it's funny he's sitting right over here anyways um you can search through here lots of images and there's free ones look all these free ones here aren't these cute oh handmade with love that's super adorable all right so that's phrases so it's just a subset now editable images is a relatively new feature this is a Cricut access um Cricut access exclusive you can you can always play around with things even if you can't cut it you can play with it so editable images lets you it's kind of like what it exactly says like I can just put this on the screen right now I'm going to add that to the canvas you just select it click add to Canvas let's zoom out oh it's very large and let's move this right here and then I can change this text right so I can click on this and I can change it to be Jennifer right so super cool easy it's um a really quick way to make a gift for someone for example um without having to worry about your own design skills so that's editable images and I'm going to delete that there we go okay uh next is upload we're going to get to that I'm going to skip over that for now we're going to talk about that when we do our personalized project and then monogram is another Cricut access exclusive feature it lets you make cute Monograms so you just type in your initials and you get to choose themes and it makes really cute Monograms all right so that's the what we have done the left across the top here we have all of our actions and our our ability to edit things okay so um right here very importantly this is undo this Arrow here that points to the left is undo or in your screen it would Point like this way and then the one pointing to the right is redo so if I undo this we should see what I just did get undone but I'm going to go forward and go back okay and I'm going to delete my text it just feels kind of silly all right so there's our heart um moving across the bar we have the operation menu very important the operation menu let's you change the operation the type so what your layer is set to by default most things are set to basic cut which this one is and we can see it says when it's selected we select it see and it tells us what the operation is it will also tell us over here in the layers panel but we can switch it so let's say we wanted to to draw this with our pen I could change this to draw a pen and it will change to an outline because that's how the pen works and it will draw the heart for me um if this is what you would the options on um Cricut Joy are cut draw and foil and on the joy extra it adds in print then cut and then we move up to the explore and we add in score in in addition I'm adding in these things and then when we move up to the maker we get all everything that you see here cuz I have my machine set to the maker um and and all the machines can use a guide if I select guide it just changes to a pink line that we can use to help us with designing things but this pink these guidelines will not cut or Draw or anything like that so they're they're just there for you know designing okay I'm going to undo that too all right go all the way there we go all right and then right next to operat ation is what I call the Color Picker and if you click on this you get to pick the color so there are preset colors right up here so we can change this right now to Red just by clicking red but if you would like your own custom color you can click on Advanced and then you have access to all like the whole spectrum of that one particular color and you can also choose other colors with this spectrum slider here you could even type in a hex code down here if you need to match a color so but we're going to go with red I love red that's my favorite color all right next that is deselect on the off chance that you want to deselect um when you're not when nothing is selected you can just select this will select all so there's a select all that may or may not you know may sometimes it's useful when you have to select everything so right there and then the edit menu lets you do the normal edit functions that you probably you use your keyboard for I know I do so and the keyboard shortcuts are right there so that you you know this is like the basic stuff so cut which is command X on Mac control X on Windows copy paste duplicate delete all those normal things but you don't have to use your keyboard if you're not into using your keyboard you can just use this menu I prefer to use my keyboard but that's all it's up it's all up to all everybody gets to decide and this is fact a great time to tell you about the secret menu it's not really a secret but it's it's it's not obvious for those of you who aren't used to things like this so I wish I could oh I do have a mouse I could show you on hey Greg do you still have that Mouse did you take it I didn't take it huh wonder where it went I was going to show I can't pull my uh can you look to see and find my that Mouse I was using earlier today because I want to show them something and my mouse won't reach it is too short well any Mouse how about that Mouse over there connected to the Mac sorry everybody see that one over there dropped it oh I dropped it thank you okay Mouse okay let's just do a quick refresher on our Mouse because we are using a computer I'm not a trackpad I know this laptop over here has a trackpad I do not like the trackpad I get I have so many issues with it I'm just not a trackpad kind of girl um even though I've had laptops with them for such a long time I am much happier with a mouse okay anyways so if you struggle with your trackpad get a mouse um this is just a mouse that we have no fancy mouse but um on most mouses you have the left click button which is right here the right click which is here most of the time you're just clicking here right if you click however and this is the scroll scroll wheel this will move things up and down if you click on the right button you can act usually access a lot of cool things okay just in case you've never tried that before you can do this with a trackpad on the trackpad you see the trackpad here usually you have to tap on this side to get to it okay so that you know anyways so if you going back to cred design space if you right click on a layer you get the secret menu and the secret menu has a bunch of options in it and what options you have depend on what your what layer is selected its status what is going on with it all those kinds of things so you can ungroup grouping and ungroup right from here cut duplicate delete all the things there's lots of things I use this it's really a contextual menu it's not a secret menu but I use this all the time it's just a right click or I guess a right tap on your trackpad um anyways let's go ahead and duplicate right now now we have two hearts uh yeah so just so you know about that menu I want to be sure you know about it let's change this heart to Blue okay really nice and easy okay moving across our next one is and I'm going actually actually let's talk about selecting so I've told you that you can just click on things to select them you can also click click on them from the layers panel right here if you want to if you need to select multiple things there's a couple ways to do it you can of course click on select all top of the screen like I told you but you can if you just want to select some things and not all things you can hold down the shift key on your keyboard right here and select two items in your list or more right so over over here in your layers panel you can do two items another way you can do it is to click hold and drag a bounding box around and it doesn't have to completely Encompass both layers or all layers just catch them right so just has to touch them and then you have the layers that you selected around selected or you drew your box around right so that's um a way to select you can also do select all from the keyboard command a or control a if you want to all right but let's let me do this and show you the next um items align I'll let you align a whole bunch of different ways you're going to align left you can align the tops which you know they're the they're like the same size let's make one a little bit different notice I'm holding down my shift key right here um so that it's just a habit you didn't really have to do that because it's actually locked still but whatever okay so now it's slightly different size um that's what I do it's just one of those designer things all right so we can align them horizont ially vertically all the ways centered that was pretty much the same um right right so a line is really useful um you can also arrange them so you can group and ungroup here and you can send items to the front or back on your canvas it may not it often will not make any difference for when you actually go to cut them but when you're designing sometimes like something needs to be behind something else you could come over to the layers panel and just like move it down like this but you can also just go to arrange and send it back like that soever something is missing go find it in layers panel and choose send to front you can flip things so I can flip this upside down or it's Mirror Image so you want see that so there it is flip vertical but if we rotated it and I'll use that corner box to rotate it and then flipped it like this you can see it flips but let's undo all of that there we go and we can also offset offset is a awesome really awesome useful feature so if we click on Offset you can you see this blue outline that appeared let's actually move this down so you can see it better see that blue outline that's appeared around it so you can create an offset for a shape this is really useful for decals stickers things like that or just designing in general you can control how much of an offset there is and how little so you can actually do an inset it's a very light blue it's hard to see but there is one there and um but I'll just do an Offset you can choose smooth corners or square corners click apply and now you have a new offset layer which is super cute right um warp is a what you can see up here this is a text feature so let's add some text to our canvas again and again it put it there we go all right so let's say say hello let's try that again there we go all right so here's our text and we can choose warp and um again Cricut access feature but you can play with it so you can do cool warping shapes as kind of you can't see it let's move it down here um see all sorts of cool things you can actually control how much warp there is too right here and then you can undo it so it's if you if you love to make t-shirts this is a fun feature all right going back to what we were working on so um next going back to our heart oh yes the size menu so I told you about how you can oops that was my menu I just hit my right my right key um you can see the size right here um if you selected it it'll tell you the size right but it also tells you the size right up here so 1.71 n in by 1.51 n in so if you wanted a more exact size you could attempt to drag it but it's kind of tricky to get exactly two in it's much easier to just type two into the size box up here so I type the two and then I press return or enter to set it and this little lock icon right here maintains the proportions when it's locked which it is by default so one moment okay so the lock icon closed you might have heard me say that in my tutorials I've said that so many times we when we resize it we keep all the proportions right if we unlock it so now you see the little lock icon up here here is open the little lock is now when we resize it we can change the proportions so you can have a short chunky heart or a tall skinny heart just like that and um it's up to you sometimes a design will call for it and sometimes it won't so I'm going to undo that and it should be locked again but you can also lock it you can lock it in that new proportion and then resize it too and then you can rotate so if you struggle to get the right rotation from here you can rotate it up here instead just by typing that in and this this more menu will show up let's undo that actually this more menu here will show up when your screen is a little bit more narrow than there's enough room for I had to make my screen narrower for H so that I could fit all these different windows in tonight but um you can just click this to get access to them and it's not even a super important function in my opinion it's the position of the item on the screen occasionally you need to nudge something a little bit up or down or maybe you can't find it you need to bring it back to zero or something like that so you can manually change it here if you need to um honestly I never use that if I have to move things a little bit I use my keyboard so I'm just pressing the arrow keys on my keyboard to move backward and forward like this and and it works for up and down too see how I'm nudging it just a little bit if you hold down your shift key you can get a much bigger movement if that's helpful to you to know all right so that's across the top and then the layers panel over here um it's on layers tab but there's also another tab if you click right here this is the color sync tab and this is useful for times when you might have two different Reds but don't realize it and you want to check and you can't figure out why it's sticking one heart on one mat and a different color on another mat when they're supposed to both be red and both supposed to be cut out of the same paper for example so you can use color sync to get everything into the color you want so for example if I wanted everything to be red right now all I have to do is drag it into the red just like this and now everything will be red right so it's an easy way to get the same color or to you know sync up your colors that's why it's called color sync but let's go back and undo all that cuz I like my colors all right um and I should actually note see how even though our text appears black it's actually a dark gray and it shows us that here so if we wanted our text to be black the same black that you see around this offset it would be a good idea for us to move it up here into the black so it all cuts from the same mat so that's color sync going back to layers though I mean basically this just shows us our layers at the top here we have group and ungroup so if you our letters are grouped our text letters are grouped um but and we can ungroup them if we want to I'm not going to go into that right now but um you can also group items grouping is a way to organize things on your canvas so if I select these three hearts and choose group they now become a group they're all nested under this group icon right here and I can select them and they're all selected as a group and I can move them around as a group and I can resize them as a group and it's useful when you're designing but this is just for on your canvas it is not they're not going to cut together like this or anything like that this is just a Design Group um and then you can ungroup the same way you just click it again and it ungroup it or you can use that that menu that the secret menu I mentioned right so if these these were grouped again and we right clicked on this we can ungroup right from here okay um Al across the top you can also duplicate from here so I can click this and I can get another heart I can delete from my keyboard and uh you can delete also from here too so so that's across the top and then each of these items here are the things on your canvas and you can click them to and they will the bounding box will appear around them you can even change the name of them by double clicking on them you all asked me and told me last year that you so wish that cricet had this ability well they listen to you and now you can rename your layers so yay so you can rename them here and then it says what the operation type is right here which is really very helpful too and you can hide and show your layers so that you if you don't want to cut them or design with them you can just hide them so now that blue heart is hidden but not deleted and if I want to see it again I just click it again and there it is at the bottom of the menu we have any template that we might have applied so I've hidden it right now but this is our apron template and if I zoom out I should be able to see it somewhere on my canvas though I don't is oh I see it's just so big there's the apron right so we could put these Hearts onto our on our apron and make a cute little apron right there if we wanted right so I'm using keyboard shortcuts again to zoom in so it's just command plus on Windows it would be Control Plus all right so but I'm going to hide that templates again are like guides they're just custom shapes and you can use them for Designing below this we're almost to the end of the tour everybody below this are five more icons and these are our main actions our most popular ones so I'm going to select some things here let's duplicate again let's put another heart on here so um if we select both we actually get access to a lot of these now because these actions mostly apply to groups of or multiples you know more than one layer I think is the right way to say that so we can slice that's the very bottom of the screen but slice lets you slice one layer out of another it works only with two layers and only two layers if you trying to use slice and it's not working you probably accidentally have more than two layers selected so I'm going to click it so you can see what it's like so once I click slice now and I'll I'll move this one out of our way now if I pull it apart you can see that it has indeed sliced out the middle of the heart here we go right so this is slice slice is really useful for creating new shapes for removing big sections of designs or just that little thing you didn't really need um because you can just slice it out with a shape right so that is sliced very useful for many things I use it in many of my tutorials but let's undo that go back to the way it was uh one more there we go and I could tell that it wasn't like if I go back one more you can see oops forward I mean redo that see how that those black lines those are our cut lines so I could tell that it was sliced so I wanted to go back one more now the combined menu right next to slice lets you um weld weld is like a permanent super glue so um it's like the it's kind of the opposite of slice it basically combines things and it sticks them together permanently so if I click weld we now have this shape and this is just one shape so you can see in the layers panel it's called weld result and it is a new shape and it's going to be like this forever unless you undo it right now another option that you could do however so let's undo that is com um unite instead so if I select these two and I go to combine and choose unite now it looks really similar but there's a difference so it's still that like one shape but notice over in the layers panel that we have still these two hearts nested inside unite and we can actually change these so I can put the two hearts side by side like this and then when I click out of it look at this so this is like a new shape so it's like weld that you can undo and move this is another request that you've all had and Cricut design space and Cricut Cricket the company um listen to and tried to and created this combined feature so that you can make a weld that can be undone you know day a week years later it's pretty awesome I still Ed weld a lot I'll be honest but it's because it's mostly habit at this point so that is unite and there are let's undo that back to the way it was there we go and then there are others in here too I use them less subtract is kind of like a um well I'll just do it and I'll show you so see it it subtracted the top layer from the bottom layer and the next one is and all of all of these ones right down here at the bottom these four unite subtract intersect and exclude they're all modifiable all right um intersect um only the parts the two the layers that were intersecting are left and with the last one exclude anything that was overlapping is excluded so this can create some fun shapes and again they are modifiable so I can just click on one of those hearts and when I'm click out of it I have this shape so that's pretty cool and I think that's a great addition and uh you know that's part of the core Cricut design space they did not say that was a Cricut access um exclusive option which I appreciate all right also down at the bottom is our last a function that people often get confused with group and Weld and combine and it is called attach it's right here attach is different than both group and Weld and combine attach leaves the layers as individual separate layers but tells Cricut design space that you want those items to cut together draw together foil together whatever it is you want it will keep them together when you go to use your Cricut so if I click attach right now you'll see that they remain separate and they're nested under over here under attach but you know and I can move them around but what matters what matters is that even though they're separate when I go to cut them they're going to cut um together they're going to stay right there and that's important and you'll see why when we do our project okay all right and then um flatten let's select all of these things to show you flatten flatten is right here it won't be available if you have the Cricut Joy but it's available for everything else flatten is used for print and cut so if you make a design and you want to print it make some stickers or a t-shirt or whatever you're doing sublimation whatever it is um this is a great way to create print then cut designs and you'll see it changed to print then cut over here on the left and you can always unflatten so it's unflattened now when it's flattened it will cut it will it will print to your printer as one unit and then when you put it into your Cricut it will cut out the outline of those objects so you know all right and the last one over here is Contour Contour is harder to show you without making a shape and I'll do it real quick I'll take this heart I I got to detach that all right so I'm going to take this heart and well I'll take I'll take this one here and I'm going to just Center them a line Center and then I'll use slice to slice out the inside of that heart okay so we have done that now we have a heart shape now and uh so now if I use Contour you'll see that well now you can see that Contour is lit up because now there is it's a more complex image it's not just a single shape um that's what Contour is for and if I click it I can now manipulate the different parts of the image so we use Contour to um turn the cut on and off of different things so if you find a design you really like but it's got some weird part on it that you don't like or something about it isn't right for you you can come into contour and modify it and make it right for you so you can say hide all Contours and it'll just go back to the shape see so that's Contour okay and I think that's mostly everything I should know I didn't I didn't call attention to the zoom down here so you can zoom in and out using the the plus and minus a um icons on this thing in the lower left and you can scroll side to side using the scroll bar there we go um so yeah I think that's everything so are you ready to make a project with me because I would love to show you so we're going to make this super cute card together this is a uar so we're g to make it as a certificate but you can have this design and make it as a card for someone that you care about okay so the way that we're going to do this is I've designed this for you and I'm going to give it to you free because I that's basically what I do I love to give things away for free but you need to go get it so in your Cricket kickoff handbook on page 27 you will find all the instructions so if you need to follow along afterwards everything is here for our simple project that we're going to personalize we're going to begin by how to find download and unzip an SVG file okay I said that right there so I don't forget anything to do that we are going to go to um my website oops that's not it I'll show it to you in just a second I have to get to it all right that's really big let's make it a little smaller there we go okay so there's a lot of stuff on the screen sorry I'm going to try to make it a little bit neater for you so you can see just the parts that matter there we go all right so this is my website jennifermaker.com so I keep all of my free files in my libraries so to find them you go to libraries in the red bar at the top and you can either get a password if you don't want yet have one passwords are free my my these files in my libraries are free um so you just can get a password I just like to protect them so people can't embed them on their own sites and then you click enter the library so you can go in there um hopefully I've already entered my password I haven't all right so I'm going to put in my password I'm just going to do it that you can't see what I'm typing I don't think it even I think it just showed dots so it didn't matter all right so here we are in my password on my little prompts have come up okay this is the what the P this is what the library looks like um if you are new to my library please watch this video to learn how it works uh but essentially the simplest way to explain it is that all of my projects are in here we have over 576 projects most have multiple files in them like multiple designs or not just one design and the first link you see here is the design itself like the collection of designs the second link that you see so first link for example this is a new font that we just released and oops I'm going to close my Windows laptop it's beeping at me um the first link is uh I'll show you this one is the design and the second link is the tutorial on how to do it step by step so for I have moved our cricket cricket kickoff project to the top of the library to help you find it tonight so so you want to click here to download it if you're watching this video later and you don't see this convenient yellow box at the top of my library you can search the page so to search a page you type I'm just going to show you my keyboard so you can see on the keyboard you press either contrl F or command F like this right and that brings you to a search bar right in your right in your browser and you just search for the number the number is is listed in your handbook so you don't have to remember but it's 277 and it's right here so if you can't find it okay but we're here tonight so let's just use the one at the top all right here we go so when you download it it goes into your downloads folder if you're on Chrome like I am it will show up in this little icon you can see with a little arrow pointing down in a line that's like tells you the recent downloads and then you can just just click on it and there it is in my downloads you see that I know it's a little bit small but it's right there now I'm on a Mac and my all of my Zips automatically decompress for me um they might not automatically decompressed for you if you are not sure how to unzip a file the simplest way I can tell you is to right click on it and choose um I don't even have to do this with this one so um it just will open for me on Windows if you rightclick it you can click extract all I have a whole tutorial on how to unzip files if this is confusing to you it goes much slower it shows you screenshots of Windows and Mac it is at um jennifermaker.com sbgs okay um but mine just unzips for me automatically it's super easy and all the files are inside so uh there's extra files in there that help you teach you and explain to you give you links the one that matters is the one that's called SVG and I put the the word the acronym SVG which stands for scalable vector graphics right into the file name of all of my svgs which are cut files um not all designers do that so what instead you need to do um to identify your files is either look for SVG it'll say SVG is the kind it might also say Edge HTML or Chrome HTML or something like that if you don't have a program that can read SVG files installed on your computer like inkscape or illustrator okay especially on windows so if you've ever downloaded a file and you open it up and you're like I don't see an SVG here just know that that's what's going on it's probably on Windows it's probably called Edge HTML it used to be Chrome HTML but then they they had to put the edge browser on all of their computers and windows so now it's Edge HTML all right so um we have our SVG now don't double click this so try to open it from here and so you need to go back to Cricut design space so here's my icon in my dock down here and I'll click on that and we're going to go back to the nice simple view although actually what we want is this view so you can see everything this is the better view so uh in this view we're going to upload our file we're going to just make a new project we're going to get rid of all of this nice clean slate and now you go to the upload icon you click on that and you click upload image and then you click browse and you find that image you downloaded it's probably in your downloads folder in a folder called Cricut oops you can't see right now sorry everybody let's re redo that you can only see from here the big messy window we'll do that again so you click on upload and and you click on upload image and you click on browse and then you go find the download it's probably in your downloads folder here's my downloads folder here's the Cricut kickoff certificate I double click that to open it and there is my SVG that I want to upload it'll be the only item in the folder that you can upload you can't upload text files or anything like that so um occasionally some designers will put PNG or JPEG files in their cut files I typically don't do that specifically because it can confuse you so I really just put SVG files in my SVG file Zips um if I'm doing a sublimation project those will have pgs but we're focusing on Cricut tonight so svgs so then you click open all right so now we can go back to the nice clean view which is this one all right so this is what it looks like when it first uploads uh you can change the name put in some tags if you want um if you were uploading a PNG or jpeg you would have the option to click change it but when you upload an SVG you don't change it here you would change it on your canvas so here's our cut image and we just click upload and there it is right here so it's the most recent one so you select it and then you click add to Canvas and that's how you upload it's it's not difficult at all um this is our certificate let's zoom in a little bit here so this is what we're going to make it's really very easy all you're going to do is personalize it with your name or whatever you want to write really I'll give you some suggestions though now when you first upload an SVG it will be if it's more than one layer and you can see this one is three layers over here it will be grouped so you want to ungroup it if you need to work with it do any any work with it which we do so we're going to immediately ungroup it with a um either this ungroup IC icon up here at the top or we can rightclick it and choose ungroup all right so now we have three separate layers we have the blue Ur star layer we have the yellow um back of the card layer and we have my signature okay now notice they're all set to basic cut this is normal This Is How They uh files upload to Cricut design space I am not able to change um the Orient the the operation type to let's say right for you I can't say this should upload as right everything will upload as basic cut when either I do it or you do it so that's how it works that is one of the um advantages to using a Cricut access file or a file that someone has made in design space and shared is that you can change the operation type and save it and share it and then others don't have to do as much prep work but that is just the nature of how things are so just so that you know and understand that um but I always give very or I try to give always very clear instructions as to what you should do when you prepare the files so all you have to do really is to add some text and you're going to attach it and you're going to change it to a pen remember everything that we're going to talk about is in on this page here if you know as you're following along you're just not sure if you got everything right this is everything that we're going to do okay so we've uploaded the image um we've placed it onto our canvas and now if you need to resize it it is currently the perfect size um that will fit on all of the machines but if for some reason let's say you want to make it smaller or bigger you can however to resize a multi-layer project like this any project that might be layered like this you want to select everything on your canvas so select all and then resize as a group so that everything maintains the proportions of course make sure your lock icon is on too right so we don't want to you wouldn't what what you wouldn't want to do is resize this and then resize this one don't do that resize click click select all and resize everything and I'm going to undo what I just did all right now let's add some text remember to add text we click on the text icon over on the left we get our text box and we're going to just start typing text we're gonna you can type whatever you want I'm going to T type congratulations to Jennifer maker for completing and it's a little bit too big now let's Zoom it out and then I'm just pressing return on my keyboard right I mentioned that earlier but just so I'm drawing your attention to it to get to a new line I'm pressing return oh I might have moved out of there there we go cricet kickoff okay so that's all I did I just typed it out um remember you can get out of edit mode by clicking back onto the men the canvas and you'll see I'm nothing is selected now and if you need to fix a typo I'm surprised I don't have a typo to fix you just double click on it and then you can edit it again okay all right so it's too big for our card right no problem we can resize it right so just drop pick a corner make sure your lock icon is closed it really should be on by default but click a pick a corner and click and drag until it's about the right size and then click and drag it into position it's just a little bit too big still there that looks good I'll let's zoom in a little bit more so we can see that really good okay so we're getting there by the way um I'm going to ask you to share a photo of your card so you may not want to put your full name if you're not interested in sharing your full name you could put your name and initial just your first name your family name whatever you want all right so uh here is our text now this is all great however remember everything is set to basic cut but I want you to use a pen to draw this see this is written with a pen it's not it's not this part's cut sure but this part is written with a pen one of the really cool features that all the Crickets can do is use a pen to draw so you need to change this from its default basic cut operation to a draw with a pen operation so I showed you the operation menu earlier you can use that again you can just go up to operation with your text selected and choose draw but notice what happened to the text that does not look like what I have here like it's fine if you like this and want to make it like this but notice how mine is a single stroke and it looks like a pen wrote it not a pen made bubble letters and outlined everything so when you change something to pen it doesn't fill it in it's not a this a cricut's not a printer it will literally draw around your shape right so if you don't like this look you want to change your font so let's talk about the font menu up here at the top when text is selected we get a whole new set of options including the font menu you just click this it says font right here and you just click on it to open it up oops I think I clicked somewhere else okay this is what the font menu looks like by the way you can click and drag it around on your screen if it's in your way so let's move it over here so it's not covering our text because it's really helpful to see your text as you're picking fonts so the font menu is organized in um with tabs across the top by default it'll open up to all the Cricut fonts lots of fonts in Cricut one of the best things about Cricut access are all the fonts but you also have access to your system fonts system fonts are the fonts are installed on your own computer desktop or laptop whatever there's lots of free fonts out there you can download them install them on your computer and then you can access them here so I have apparently 305 system faults fonts and you can see them all here and you can search for fonts right so the font I like to use for Jennifer maker is called pier and if I search for it this is it right here it's nice big bold easy to read font this is what I use you see it all the time and all of my you all my stuff it uses this font which I purchased and we use it all the time this is when it's not a free font and then the other tab here is bookmarked and any fonts that you've bookmarked will appear here so if you have favorites you can put them here and they'll show up here and then recently used fonts appear here so there's Cricut Sands which is on our canvas right now and it tells us that it's on the canvas and then recently used is BFC Bloom shine and bitmap so if you are like oh I just this font I just used the other day it'll be here because you recently used it but going back to the Cricut menu uh they really have a lot of fonts you can search for them by font name category style any language you know if you need a different language and then over here is the filters icon if you click this it lets you filter by all sorts of things all caps Cur multi-layer that's more than I'm going to get into tonight but I do want to call your attention to writing right here so if we click this it's only going to show us fonts that have a writing style available with them and then if we click on free we see only free writing fonts so this is what I want you to do unless you have Cricut access already and then that will show you at the time I'm doing the search 21 fonts that are free and have a writing font with included so for example we could switch to this one called rubber ducky and it'll switch to this on the canvas and this is what rubber ducky looks like right so it'll show you it's a little bit big we can resize that down so this is now set to pen and it's in the writing style right here there's actually even an italic right so this is the style menu so if you want to go back to the Bold one there you go and you can switch it back to cut if you want but we're doing writing right now so let's switch it back to writing right so you can do that but let's go back um to the font menu and I am just going to choose Cricut Sands it is a nice simple font I use it for all sorts of things it's right here and it has a writing style which looks like this and this is what I use usually use when I make this certificate so here it is again we can see it's got the pen operation that's confirmed over here draw pen same thing in the layers panel so this looks good to go but um what about my signature so even though it's a signature it's still set to basic cut because that's the default on upload so we need to switch this over to draw as well so it's really easy you just select it you go to the operation menu and you choose pen under draw and now it is set to draw so both of our layers that we want to draw just like on this one right here are now set to pen so excellent all right so it might look like we're done do you think we're done it might it really looks like we're done we have our card we have our text on it we have our name and then here's the front there's nothing that you have to do for this front this front we're just personalizing the inside of the card so this looks like it's done but there's an important step that we missed but let's just pretend that we forgot about it and let's let me show you what this is because this is It's really helpful to see it's so helpful to make a mistake so you can see what could go wrong so I'm going to go ahead and click make which is the button you click when you're ready to to make your project so I'm going to click this and that leads us to our prepare screen this is where all it gives you a preview of what your mats are going to look like when you put them into your Cricut for making stuff for you know drawing cutting all that so what we get are three mats which is un uh doesn't make sense because after all we just have two colors right and the pen is supposed to be on the yellow card so what's up so as you can see it has put the pen on its own mat and all jumbled up like this totally is not the way that I designed it this is on one map and then here is my inside of the card with no text on it and then here's the front and the this one looks fine so what went wrong here I didn't attach it I didn't tell Cricut design space where I actually wanted that pen to be and so let's go back we'll just click on the cancel button down here in the lower right corner if we go back to us designing this I'm like of course this is where we want it to be we stuck it here but this isn't really this isn't this is just a visual representation of what we're designing but we haven't given the instruction to Cricket design space to actually put that pen onto that layer but it's really easy to fix and you'll and you'll do this for many things as you're combining um operations so anytime you combine an operation um foiling on faux leather you know so that's foiling and cutting I saw when we were W for class to start somebody asked about using the deboss tool and the pen tool at the same time two operations right okay so um what you want to do is attach so attaching will tell Cricut that you want your pen on your paper so we just draw a box around all of the layers we want attached so that's the yellow layer the text layer at the top and the text layer at the bottom right so the three layers so once we do that we confirm we've got all three layers here on the side and then we click attach and it all nests under the word attach and now if we click on make you will see that it is on our card just the way that it should be so we are now good to go so before we move on I'm going to click cancel and we're going to save I like to save before I start making things um just it like makes me feel secure and I want you also not to lose your projects um so click on save save frequently and often and you can call it whatever you want I'm gonna call it cricet kickoff certificate by Jennifer maker and we'll save it to the cards menu right here now I'm a Cricut access member so I have more than five collections remember if you have a free account you get just five collections right so we don't have to even put it in a collection if you don't want to it's completely optional all right I click save and now it's saved and Cricut design space confirms that it was saved so yay all right so now we're going to click make it and this is the prepare screen it looks great you should have two layers a yellow layer with pen and you can see right here it tells us what is going to the operations that are going to happen on that mat so we've got pen and we've got basic cut it also lets us choose whether it's going to be on mat or on a card mat or without a mat right you like you could do this you could uh this is the cricket maker 3 so we could put a piece of smart card stock in there and let it let it cut that I do not recommend smart card stock for this project though um but it is possible okay but no we're going to put it on a mat and then you can choose your material size if for you know you want it like it matters in this case it doesn't really matter but you can choose it sometimes like could say you're using an 8 and 1 half by 11 and you've got a whole bunch of something and you really want to keep it on the 8 and 1 half by 11 and you would want to actually change it to 8 and 1/2 by 11 right here but it doesn't really see how it Chang on the mat um but it in this case it doesn't matter for us um like for example I'll actually just show you let's say I wanted a bunch of copies so up here project copies I'm going to make four copies and then click apply so now I've got four copies but I've only got 8 and a half by 11 paper don't do this part I'm just showing you I've got8 and a half by 11 paper which by the way isn't even going to be big enough so 8 and a/4 by 10 so now it made two m that's for my four projects right so that's good to know right so that if you ever are using a smaller piece of paper you can get you can force it to put your copies or whatever your design you know arrange them for you on those um and that will allow me having made these copies will allow me to show you how to um you can actually do some things right here on the prepare screen I can delete and hide these things or I can really hide them I can actually rotate them right here if I need to like fit things into like you know cram them trying to use all of my available space right you might be able to like rotate everything maybe I can get another one in here right I think I can get another one in here so I can come back to this mat I can click this little three dot icon in the upper left corner of it after I've selected it I can choose move object and I can move it to that other mat and now I have three certificates on one page so that's really useful but I don't actually want to cut all of these so you can also hide them so if you click those three dots you can do hide selected so let's just hide all of these things here all right there we go so all of those are HID the mat will still like appear here but it won't cut the mat so we've got our pen and basic cut mat and we have our oh we don't want all those either let's let's hide all of those too we just need one of each there we go so just know that you if you get to the screen and you want to make a bunch of something you can use project copies to do that right here all right so we've got our pen on one layer ignore this one this is just from our test and our Ur star on a second mat so just two mats you want to have just two mats at this stage pen and yellow with pen and basic cut and blue with basic cut and uh there are some other options you can mirror but mirroring is not used typically for paper crafting it's used for ironon vinyl mostly so if you are going to if you are going to um cut out an iron non vinyl project then you want to mirror it so I have tutorials on that if you want to learn how so we don't need to mirror all right so let's click continue when everything looks good click continue all all right and that takes you to the make screen I have my maker 3 connected via USB we talked about usb versus Bluetooth in lesson one I have USB because it'll be fast and reliable and that's makes me happy all right so on the make screen you select your material and you also um get instructions about how to load your mat into your Cricket or just load your material if you're using smart material right all right so first the base material so what we're doing today we want medium card stock if you don't see medium card stock here you can click on browse all materials and you can type it in so just type in medium press return and you'll get some options just choose medium card stock there's many options to choose from you want to match your material to the material settings of course if you select it and decide it's not the right one you can click it again and choose it again um if you don't see anything about M you don't even see the Brows on materials icon uh link right here you probably are using a Cricut Explore Air 2 or lower and you have a smart dial so I can kind of show you what the smart dial looks like think you can see it yes you can this is the Smart dial on the Cricut Explore air to during lesson one Cricut design space asked you to put it onto card stock but it needs to be on custom I have already moved mine to custom because we moved it in lesson two my recommendation is that you should move it to custom and leave it there don't ever move that smart dial ever again um because if you've got it on custom then that means you have access to all of these material settings that we use and this is like where all the goodies are right this is there's so many things that you can cut I mean look at this list there's so many things and there's no way a dial could fit that so keep your smart dial which only appears on the Cricut explorer um one and two right so just keep that set to custom all right so but so we've got medium card stock 80 pound that's that whether you've got 65 or 80 pound that's the right setting and then for pressure I like almost always change it to more not every time but I usually do because I would rather air on the side of more pressure than less because in my experience I found that more pressure results in a cleaner cut so you do what works for you but I love more pressure so if you find that your Cuts just really aren't as good as you want them to be try more pressure all right so we've got more pressure the other thing I want you to notice is this checkbox here that says remember material settings you want to check it because we are doing these two mats here they're both going to be 65 to 80 lb card stock there's no difference between them even though one of them will have um pen on it right it doesn't really matter so you want to have the same material and it looks like I have to go back and do it again because I was messing with them there we go card stock all right medium or more pressure and remember material settings so if we click that remember material settings box it's not going to prompt us for the material on every single map okay so it's it's useful to know that it will do that if you don't if you don't check it and that you may want it to prompt you for everyone but you also may not all right so we we're all just we're almost there Step number two is load tools and material so you want to load your black point4 pen into clamp a so here's our C Cricket maker 3 we finally get to use it all right so we're going to put our pen in um the Cricut maker 3 does not come with a pen but I got a pen as I I told you all about the that yesterday in lesson two so you can get a pen for this as if you want I am using a fineo pen I think um yes a point four tip fineo pen if it matters to you a onepoint tip would also look great okay so we need to put it into our clamp and remember what I said always make sure your pens work so I am just going to scribble here on my page and yep that's working excellent okay so we open up the clamp on clamp a right I can switch to a bigger view too so you have a nice big view of that oh that's a little bit low let me move it up a little bit more there we go all right so I've opened up the clamp on clamp a our pen adapter is still in here we were messing with it in lesson two but it's in there you want it to be in there if you're using the regular size pens don't forget that the joy pens are differently sized than the explore maker Adventure pens too all right so I usually hold the bottom here and then I press and it snaps in we close the clamp and we put our tip onto our pen so we don't lose the cap all right so that's good to go and then we need to make sure our fine point blade is in and it is in there I always like to make sure if I've been messing with it especially that it's seated well in the clamp and it is if if you're ever having an issue with it cutting and it seems like it's not cutting correctly check to make sure that your fine point blade is seated all right so now we need to put our material on our mat here is our our mat is right here I'm going to put my keyboard away now I think we're done with that so just like I showed you well if you learned the Cricut maker 3 we use Smart materials so you didn't see this and your your maker three didn't come with a mat so you'll have to get a mat for this it could be the blue mat or the green mat either one is fine for this project all right so um the mates come with the clear protective cover right so we're going to remove that before we use it this is a beautiful clean mat look at that oh I love it when they're clean okay and new they're so shiny it's so pretty all right so we're going to ref refer back to cricet design space um right here oops that's not it that's a totally different that's a graphic from lesson two okay in Cricut design space it's going to tell us what our first layer is you don't have to guess or assume what your color is it says right here it's going to be the yellow one if for some reason you wanted it to be the blue one you could just click on the blue one and it'll cut the blue one first but I like to stop at the start at the top of the list so I just go right down and it'll it'll automatic go to the next mat as you work so our first mat is the yellow mat and if you're ever not sure about placement you can hover over it like this and it'll show it to you all right so here is our beautiful new green standard grip mat and we're going to put our card stock and this here is AC card stock really nice stuff and we're just going to smooth it down you could and probably should use a brayer to really adhere it to your mat but if you are new you probably don't have a brayer yet so that's okay just press on it really well and get it stuck well to the mat okay don't worry you're like oh my gosh it's going to be so sticky I'm not going to get it off don't worry it's going to be okay all right we are just about ready so design space says to load it right let's go back and just make sure we're doing everything right always double check the screen so it says to load the pen we've done that load the fineo blade into clamp B we've checked to make sure the blade is there it will always tell if for some reason you're doing something else that requires a different blade and you're on a machine that has the ability to use other blades it will tell you what blade to use and then you load your mat and press the load and unload button okay so to load the mat you want to so there I'm going to press against the end of the mat very lightly as I press the load and unload button right here and that that is important because you really want your mat to be up against the rollers that you see right here those are going to pull it in okay so but I'm pressing lightly here this is something that I messed up when I was new I didn't I just stuck it in here I'm like oh okay let's just load it and nothing happen because it wasn't up against the fer so I press very lightly on the end of the mat and then I load it just like that now the Cricut maker uh the makers and the joy Joys and the ventures will all bring the material in and then measure it to make sure that there's enough material before it cuts um the explore 3 does that too the explore air Che does not just so you know so that in case yours behaves differently all right so if you look at the design space screen now it tells you that it's ready to go so you're now on step three it says press go speed automatically set for this material press Flash and Go Button all right so let's go ahead and cut it and we just press the flashing button the flashing button is the one that it wants you to press so if you're ever in doubt about what to press go for the flashing one but it's the middle button here of the three buttons so I'm going to press this and it's going to pull the mat in and it's going to do the first operation that's listed which is pen so it's going to write first and then it'll cut second have a good view we can see all that yes I always like to look in there and make sure it's writing it is so um the Cricut pen or this Cricket in general won't write the way we do where we would be like congratulations to it'll write in a different order it's I presume it's writing in the most efficient order um but it might be related to the font I don't know but so don't be surprised if it does some letters at first and not others it doesn't mean that your Cricut is messing up or anything like that it just does some and then it does them all time for more tea and remember um I highly recommend for learning well first of all if you want to follow along with me watch the video change the speed to the speed that works the best for you because you can slow it down you can go really slow if you want um you can also go faster if I'm going too slow for you so you can change the speed on the video to match what is right for you you can pause you can rewind watching the video is uh you know with the ability to pause replay slow things down or speed things up I know people who like to do both is really really a good way to learn this is really better than if you were sitting right here next to me I swear it is because it's you know you might ask me to repeat something twice you might but you know like you you might not ask a third time right but with a video you can have me say it 20 times if you want you don't have to worry about it it's always there whenever you are I might not be up at 3:00 a.m. but you might be up at 3:00 a.m. wanting to make something and you can just open up the video and play it honestly video learning through videos is one of the best things ever uh Greg and I were just talking about it on the way in this morning because someone had asked about doing a Cricut Retreat like in person and I'm like oh my gosh it would be likea chaos you know everyone trying to use their machines at once and it would be noisy and people couldn't really really truly understand the way that you can when you've got a video that you can rewind rewatch no matter at whatever speed you want so just say all right so it has finished looks like it's finished the writing now it's going to cut see all the writing is on there so now it's cutting it out it's got four stars on it and then I think it cuts all the way around it there we go awesome all right so when it's done your machine will tell you um your Cricket sorry Cricket design space will tell you it tells you to unload the mat it was giving me progress updates too but I was too busy talking to you to say them sorry I showed them in lesson one though so to unload it we press the flashing button right right here and want to hang on to it so it doesn't just fall onto the floor and there is our cut design look at that it did a great job okay so to unload it from your mat this is a brand new met should be super sticky right so what you want to do is first if you're new you might be like okay well I'm going to just take it off right if you do it like this it might rip it might tear it will probably definitely curl the card stock and I'm doing it like this to show you what can happen so it actually came off really nicely but it did curl the card stock right not too bad it's actually fairly good but I've seen much worse but it is curl a little bit the best way however to remove any material from your mat is to flip it over onto your work surface just like this and then you peel the mat back from your paper when you do that it kind of just removes itself you see how it's just coming off but it allows you to keep your card stock perfect or whatever whatever you're taking off it keeps it perfectly flat see nothing curled or ripped or anything like that so so this is the way I want you to remove it from your mat too might have to poke out a little star right but there it is doesn't that look excellent isn't that beautiful all right our next layer then is just a cut layer so we want to go back to our crickets right now open up clamp a or you know whatever clamp you're using if you have a joy you only have one clamp and put away your pen put that put the cap on your pen so it doesn't dry out in your Cricut CU you left it there cuz yes I have done that before all right so on our mats we have some Stars use your scraper like I told you about yesterday and you just scrape them right off you can sit here and try to pick them off but they'll get under your fingernails and it doesn't feel good and it's very timec consuming and tedious so just trust me on this use a scraper all right next next uh layer is the blue so pay attention to the orientation if your piece of paper is really small because it does cut the wide way not the short way so I'll put mine on my mat like this just to be absolutely sure we have enough you can by the way if you don't have a brayer but you do have a scraper you can actually use your scraper to push your paper onto your mat if you would like so there we go it's on there nice and nice and good all right so we just go ahead and load our next m in pressing it against the rollers and then pressing our load button and it loads in it'll check to make sure there's enough just like before now it's just got a mat so I me it can't really tell it's not like it it it knows for sure so you can't really read the material on your mat it's just what it does and then once the play button the Go Button starts flashing we press it there we go and that layer will cut and we're almost done and this won't take too long it's just a cut so and um let me show you the progress bar since I was too busy talking to show that before so on the screen you'll see it's um showing you a progress It's already at 100% but notice it's not done cutting right so um it's not done what that what that progress bar is is from what I can tell it's sending the instructions from design space to your Cricut so it's not saying it's 100% done cutting or drawing or whatever it's telling that it has sent 100% of the instructions to your Cricut I think I think that's what it is or the operations I don't know I'm just guessing but that's from my observation that's what that is so if you see this don't think that your Cricut is broken this is totally normal this is faster than the Explorer yes so the maker 3 is the second fastest Cricket uh the maker 3 and Explorer 3 are about the same Speed The Venture which I would love to show you tonight but we don't have a power um another power cord to bring in to show you so that I saw someone asked about that but you can see it in the background um The Venture is the fastest if you want to see how fast the Venture is I have a video on just the Venture that shows you in real time how fast it cuts and draws all right so this is ready to go we press that unload button and here is our project it did a great job the Cricut really does a great job always I'm always amazed and impressed by it which is why I am here talking to you about it um because I got a cricket in 2017 not really thinking about I just thought it was going to be another tool you know another craft tool and it just blew blew my mind okay so this layer is a little bit more intricate so be more careful as you're I know taking it off the mat it's not bad or anything just you know be don't just rip it off or anything you don't want to rip off your nice pretty words and this is what it looks like isn't that lovely all right so let's still take off this one I take it off the same way and you are left with this cute little design you could save the Stars if you wanted but I'm just going to scrape all of it off like this there we go and make sure you get it all off move your paper out of your work area so it doesn't wander back in and then be sure to put your cover back on your mat to protect it do it right away not later just because you're busy but right away it makes a difference I promise okay so back in cricet design space this is what we see it says it's done and we can click done um this project instructions box someone recently showed up if you click on this it gives you some information about the projects it tells you what was used say it save for offline you know set to private so it's there might be some information in here if this is like a Cricut Community project or Cricut Access Project but not always right but just so you know and you can of course click edit and add some details so if you want to leave notes for yourself you could do that here um and but otherwise just click done and it takes you back to your canvas and apparently I'm being asked for a survey well I think that that my experience today was five stars Cricket you did a good job I always wonder if they ever watch my videos all right anyways I have no idea if they do I really don't know um all right so that's it that's so nice and easy hopefully that was an easy introduction to some of the core um Fe functions of your Cricut it's something beyond the test cut but it's something you can do and what I want you to do is I want you to oh I didn't tell you how to put together getting ahead of myself got to tell you that part is really easy though really easy so um I put the cover on the mat and then got distracted by the survey all right so here are our finished pieces oops here we go right so to assemble them all you have to do is you flip this one over so it's m image and then you just put the little Corners into the corners of your certificate no tape or glue is needed you just just put them in like this and you have a cute little certificate or card you can just make this for someone put it into a lunch box or a gift brighten someone's day and what I want you to do is I want you to put it on either direction but put it on your Cricket oops that fell over that's not good let's put it here put it on your Cricut and take a photo of it and share it with me in our cricket crafters and makers group group at jennifermaker.com ccricket Crafters I would love to see your your projects it makes me feel really good to know that I helped you make something totally 100% for real I'm a little tired right now it's true you can I can hear it in my voice you can probably see it on me so but I genuinely care and I don't have to do this right this is not like a mandatory thing at all I truly care about you being enabled to make things okay so send give me a photo make my night I'll probably look I might not look at them tonight I might rest tonight but I'll definitely look at them tomorrow or sometime this weekend all right so do this for me now some of you I I have mentioned this before and I have done it in uh previous Cricket kickoffs so you see I have all my Cricket sitting here the joy The Joy extra the original maker the maker 3 the cricket explore air the explore the explore 3 I even have the adventure back here though like I said it's not it doesn't have its power cord it's not attached to power because this is a lot of crickets guys so we didn't attach that one but all the others are currently on and they're currently connected to my Cricut design space so what I would love to do is try or show you how or at least we're going to try it's not like there's ever a guarantee I want to try cutting and writing cutting to them all at the same time would you like to see us try it's not there's no guarantee it'll work um but but we have managed to do it in the past so we're going to add in another Cricket this year so it'll be one more and we're going to do it from um my Mac yes crystal says please okay it'll take me a little bit to set up but I Tred to do some Advan advanced work okay Cricut Joy extra came out in the summer we've got our yellow paper on it we need our pen so we'll have to switch this one because the joy and the joy extra um you have just one clamp so keep that in mind so it can't be like a race or anything same for our joy over here we'll take out its blade also put in its pen oops oh I know that these work because I used them earlier today but as always remember that you should do a little scribble test okay it's good you know cuz sometimes if they haven't been stored properly they might not the ink might not be flowing okay all good okay got our pens in I'm going to get all the pens in because the pen is the first layer right we need our pen over here we know this pen Works cuz we just used it so put this in this slot all right and then this one needs a mat too so let's put a mat on it this is the this is the part I look forward to cuz I'm always I'm always amazed that we can do this always a little bit scared too because you know like I don't know I don't know what there is to be scared of I guess I could fail but so what who cares if I fail at least I tried right okay got a big piece of yellow it doesn't matter it's in the right spot so open up the maker put in its pen do its scribble test that looks good this is a blue pen not a black pen because that's what I've got okay there's three four the Cricut maker we're going to stand up to get up to this one uh here's its pen let's check it it's good these are all fine points but I'm sure that they would be fine if they were thicker and the explore three the gray pen okay so all my pens are the ink is flowing and ready to go okay now we need to get them all loaded so I have prepared the screen so I told you earlier that you can create new windows for when you're in Cricut design space for desktop so that's what I have done so we're going to go and make sure that we've got them all this one that we just did we'll send this one to the maker 3 cuz that was selected already so we'll go ahead and let me show you my screen you'll see all the windows all right so we'll go ahead and send this one get this one ready to go and connected to the maker 3 medium card stock with more pressure okay so I can load this one in all right maker 3 is ready to go all I'll have to do is press the flashing button when I'm ready so I'm going to try to do it you know a similar time all right next one is down here this is the original maker and this one should be ready to go also and so you saw how that was in a different window so I'm connected to different crickets right now one window I'm connected to the maker 3 and another window I'm connected to the maker I have this for all of them here's one for the Cricut Explore Air 2 and these are these windows are in my installation of Cricut design space for desktop you do this for Mac or windows so if we go back here this was the maker here's the explore 3 here's the explore Air 2 that I just loaded um and here is the explore air 3 and then we need to do our Joys right so I have one here for Joy here's the joy right here medium card stock with more pressure and right and it does the pen first so there we go now like the joy extra it you don't have to press so there's no buttons on the joys it just uh you just have to bring it in and it will grab it if it's ready to go and then the Cricut Joy I'm actually doing over on my iPad because I run out of of I run out of space for it but it's ready to go to I didn't want to leave it out okay so we got everything all loaded are you ready are you ready for us to try look at this mess oh my gosh we need to clean this up so we can have a nice shot of it we're doing it there is that better almost we've got a weird mouse sitting over here there we go that looks good put this weird piece of blue paper okay so I can't click go all at the same time the joys will have a they deserve a handicap because I'm going to have to switch their pens out so I'll I'll do the joy then the joy extra and then I will do oh is Greg going to help me oh yeah come over here help me Greg's going to come help me thank you you press the go button on these can you'll have to reach over here to get the middle button on these two and I will do you can do more if I'm busy we'll try to do them about the same time here's Greg thank you Greg all right so I am going to start you ready so I'm going to press go on the joy and go on the joy extra and go on the Cricket maker go on the cricket maker 3 do them all y thank you isn't this awesome they're all cutting at the same time and it worked I always worry like something's going to go wrong but the criced design space is awesome it truly is the fact that it can do this this is a testament to the software so good job software Engineers I think you get a lot of flack and but the fact that we can do this is a really big deal so way to go so drawing drawing drawing drawing I guess we'll see which one ends these will have to be switched right cuz the joys have just one clamp I'll keep an eye on them and we can switch them note that the joy is cutting it's turned 90° because it's M Small smaller everything else seems to be cutting at The Cutting well I think it's so cool I only do this once a year cuz you know to get all the Crickets out and get them all set up like Greg and I were scrambling all over like getting all the things connected to do this so but once a year we we get them out and we do it Danny says let's pop the champagne I agree that sounds awesome all right so if you would like to see my screen when my my maker 3 doesn't even like show oh that's because I switched it that's right I'm like why is it not showing let me show you what my screen looks like if you're curious here we go so you'll notice most of them say um 100% so again 100% of the instructions have been sent but they're clearly not done uh here is the maker still maker 3 is still writing everything is still riding right now um the explore 3 is cutting the explore three Greg might have pressed it early what why is the explor 3 faster than the maker 3 it's still writing did I press it that much slower I mean it wasn't I mean whatever so this is done oh I have to fix these let's put their blades in there we go and then then I need to press uh go on them on the um you know right on the apps there we go still going still going done still going the maker 3 is finishing though maker 3 is done explore 3 is done explore air Che is done maker is done cricet Joy extra is done and the at Joy is done wasn't that awesome they had a little bit more to go that was so cool it worked good job cricet so there we go so for everyone who wonders because I will often get this question like can you cut to more than one cricet at a time and yes you can with the design space for desktop app so we can unload all of these and I'll show you my screen that's the joy extra extra unloading these all have you know their normal unloads I should just keep them in cuz where exactly what am I going to do with these we're just keep them we're just going to keep them in one moment we just load that again I will need to remember take my pens out though otherwise but you know we will we will clean up before we're done for sure all right so um was that cool hey Greg can I get you to fix my notes again thank you and I'm going to take a tea break again thank you for all the Applause everybody other way that's it oh wait yeah that's it thank you all right so back in Cricut design space um we can see it's telling us all that we're done if I if I click this and we're going to just leave it we're we're done we finished finished but you know you can you are not done right and while this does bring us to the end of cricket kickoff it doesn't have to be the end of your learning right at all I hope it won't be because I hope you're going to hang out with me and keep doing more I do so many tutorials and I would love to have you along to play with me um if you are eager to keep learning and really take full advantage of your Cricket I have something else just for those of you who stayed to the end of class just this morning I opened up enrollment for my very popular Cricut design space course called Cricut College design to shine I'll put the link up on the page um it is only open for public enrollment for just one week registration closes on Saturday January 6 and it's not going to open again until summer maybe sometimes I go a full year before I open it so there's no guarantees on when I open it next I only open it once or twice a year so I can really focus on our new students and so my team can give give them the support and help they need to learn their crickets really well I know we have some Cricut design space students and alumni here in the chat if you've taken Cricut design space or design to shine I'm a little bit tired sorry if you've taken design to shine let us know in the chat I love to see your faces I mean I've noticed many of you already here but let us know right you can learn if you are interested in doing Cricut College it is a lot of fun um it is a lot like Cricut kickoff but we go deeper into all of those those extra things what's print and cut like how does that work you know all of those things how do we make stickers how do we make 3D objects how do we do all of these things Cricut college is the place to do it at you can get details on it at jennifermaker.com design toshine you can also just go to maker academy.com I will show you what that looks like so you're not confused by it when you go there here here we go so this is what it looks like if you go to design to shine it's on a bunch of places but um this is my design space course I've been teaching this for it'll be almost four years this summer and um there's lots of like if you're curious about it read about it I've got all of the details about all the cool things that we make in it and of course you you may be wondering why you would want to enroll in something like this rather than my free tutorials right so this enrollment page will show you a lot of information about it but there's also cricet has you know Cricket learn which is free um so the question is why would you want to enroll in cricet college design to shine rather than use crickets learns workshops which are awesome you should definitely do those but the big reason to do something like design to shine is that I'm not a cricket employee or contractor or anything like that I'm a Cricut fan and I can give you a completely unbiased approach to using your Cricket I can tell you I can tell you all the tips hacks and workarounds that you really need to succeed right so I won't shy away from saying this isn't quite this isn't right do this instead and I also don't push Cricut access because it's typically required to use their images right in fact you don't need Cricut access at all for my course because I provide everything you need right inside of it I also teach on all the platforms and I have a dedicated support team known as design counselors who make sure that every student is supported look at these awesome things Judy made um so this is a big deal to us this is why we don't have it open all the time now when you're in there you you get support all the time but when we open it we get lots of new students right but the biggest reason to do design to shine is that in my opinion is that it's a true program that builds upon itself logically in each unit walking you through every important task step by step each thing I teach you is explained clearly in searchable videos and printable workbooks not unlike the Cricut kickoff handbook right so this is Cricket kickoff is is really similar to cricet college except we go a lot deeper and I teach you how to design right in Cricut design space and everything I teach is reinforced over and over in a variety of ways to make sure you learn in the way that works best for you I don't skip steps I take you through slowly explaining everything as I go you were fully supported through our Q&A Center behind the design videos that's where I recorded myself designing things right in cricet design space um all the projects that you see on our page in fact let me just show you uh which page is it this one all of these projects are made in Cricut design space I actually show you how I design design them too so and this is I often hear this is the best part is watching me like how I how how did I do that so that you can see exactly how it works there's also cheat sheets a private student group and you can watch and rewatch whenever and wherever you want and we help everyone regardless of whether you're on desktop or iOS or Android so even if you have a desktop right now but you get an H new iPad next year you can revisit design to shine and learn how to use design space there too this is a true program when it's built really carefully I spent I put a lot of time into it making sure that it was um thoughtful to really teach you how to independently make projects on your own without having to rely on Cricut access sorry Cricut or expensive svgs from Etsy or following step-by-step tutorials even from me for the rest of your crafting life but registration will close on January 6th so you're going to want to unroll before then as I won't reopen it until maybe summer or maybe not until next year you can enroll at jennifermaker.com design toshine or simply visit maker academy.com and I have something just for those of you who have been doing Cricut kickoff with me live if you enroll in Cricut college right now you'll get access to my Cricut reference guide collection there are a total of eight yes eight digital guides in this collection that are filled with tips and information that will help you Cricut faster easier and better there's over 80 pages of Cricut cheats in fact it is an awesome resource if I say so myself and like everything we keep it up to date when there are changes we went through and updated all of them we're also updating all of our workbooks in Cricut College to make sure that they we are showing you the most up-to-date changes because Cricut design space changes a lot as you might know all right so that's Cricut design or Cricket design or Cricket College designed to shine if you're interested I would love to see you in there if not it's totally okay too no pressure that's that's how I work all right so you have questions and I have answers so let me help you out my team has been collecting questions for me and I would love to help you okay let's see here Pamela says where do you find calibrate now to calibrate the maker before using print and cut so if you go to Cricut design space let's go back there let's go to our nice little photo our nice or multiple angle one CU it's all nice and clean and neat okay so here I am we are all done we've we've I was afraid I was going to fall on the floor okay we're good all right so um you go up to your profile up here your account you click on this you go to settings and you go to machine and then you go to machine calibration there's the maker 3 you click on that you click Start and then you choose which calibrate you want to do that's how you do it okay Lori says I struggle with design space after cutting when it's more than just cut or print are instructions for projects always somewhere or are you own on your on are you on your own after cutting I have hundreds of projects that have very specific details have you checked out my tutorials they're free you should totally do that because I love criced access I do but no they're not detailed in their instructions with 600,000 images I can see why that would be difficult that I couldn't do that either but I put out a new tutorial at least once a week and my tutorials are very detailed that leads you from start to finish whether you're brand new or you have some experience I tell you exactly how to cut how to draw how to foil whatever it is that we're doing in my tutorials so maybe you're not familiar with my projects they're at jennifermaker.com so I highly recommend you try those now if you really want to make something from Cricut design space and you don't see instructions then you can always ask in my Cricket group at jennifermaker.com ccet Crafters uh let us know what the project is and ask if anyone else has made it or if they have ideas is and we would be happy to help you out there are in in the projects area of Cricut design space they usually do list some basic instructions and some basic materials it's not really in-depth but that might be also a place to look for at least something uh okay Virginia says how do you follow someone okay so if you want to follow me you can go to jennifermaker.com /f on cricet if you want to follow someone else because I get it if you you know just don't want to follow me I will show you what to do so in cricket design space you go to back to home and right up here it says search projects fonts and profiles so let's search for Ashish Aurora he is the CEO of cricket let's see if we can find him so images projects people this is not him there he is right here so we click on his profile there he is he's awesome look at all his followers look at all his awesome projects this is his profile and I mean I'm pretty sure I'd followed him before but I apparently had not so I'm going to follow him now so this is how you follow someone you just click that follow button and then they're followed that's it so you just search for them so you may it may be harder to find find certain people um but you know sometimes you can actually share your profile link with other people just like I shared mine with you I'm trying to point to it I'm not very successful here it is at jennifermaker.com slf follow- me- on- cricet that is the link that it just goes right to my profile so that's how you do that okay how do you copy from one to design space window to another design space window great question all right so I'll have to show you in the big messy window here's a big messy window okay so let's open up two windows and make it a little less messy so here's one click on canvas let's open up another new window put them side by side this is what I usually do on my monitor I usually have two windows side by side like this and click on canvas okay so let's say over here let's go to my stuff let's get my awesome heart and stick it on my canvas okay I made this heart many years ago oh I don't want to make it I just want it to go on my canvas customize there we go there's my heart and let's say you know I don't know I did some contouring and I changed something about it whatever so it's because if it's just in your images what's the big deal right let's say I modified it somehow and it was really important to me how i' modified it we're just going to pretend okay so here it is and let's say this over here is like a t-shirt project and I want to copy it so you can just copy it so you just do um I'll show you on my keyboard I guess you can't see it but I'm going to copy command C and then I'm come over to do in command v wait did that work copy paste right so that's better I can show you with the secret menu so remember to get to that secret menu it is just a rightclick you could also go up here to edit copy here and then you go to your other window and then you can just go to edit and paste so there you go that's how you move things from one project to another project in Cricut design space for desktop you can't do this in the on the iPad or the Android uh Virginia says are the projects people save and share sized a a atically usually but um you know like it'll be sized the way that they sized it may not be the right size for you but yeah usually those are sized my files pretty much they upload at the correct size there's been some periods where design space changed them but right now all is good and they upload at the correct size we we have some things that we do to make sure our files are very clean to make make sure that they upload it the right size uh Sonia says can we save our designs as we do on Cricket on our desktop or laptop no you are not able to export out of Cricut design space I think that some files some low resolution files are saved somewhere on your computer um but they're low resolution they're also like just pixelated images they're not Vector so that's have no use to me personally um if you make some amazing design here like I say a print then cut design and you really really want to use it you can go into here this will actually answer another question in fact while we're doing it so that's good let's go back to the window okay here's a shees we're going to go to a new project I'm going to replace this one okay um let's say let's paste our heart in here let's say you really um you did something you designed something amazing and you really want to I don't know print it out somewhere else or whatever you can turn off the grid like this I just clicked up here oh that's like a little trick sorry you can click in this little space between the rulers to turn your grid um to toggle it between Big Grid little grid and no grid okay sorry I should have I should have explained that okay but there you go you can also go to your settings to turn your grid off but you turn off your grid and then you can take a screenshot of your this just me taking a screenshot right now you can take a screenshot of it right now it's just an image it's not a vector design so this may not really help you but you know if you did something cool and you want to record it or save it because you're going to print it out you could do that so that's one possibility for you Lisa says can I run Cricut with access from an external hard drive Drive due to limited MacBook space I don't know actually I don't know if that I don't know if it needs to save its internal files you know its Pro its application files in I know they go into the library uh in your system folder that's really an oversimplification I I suspect that you need to have you need to have those what did I say 2 gigabytes 4 gigabytes it really needs that space if your hard drive is that limited you should probably find some way to remove files and I realize that's easier said than done but as a person who's used a computer for a really long time I will tell you that if your hard disk is that full you are probably experiencing extremely slow speeds right now that's probably driving you nuts because with with a hard drive that that's full you don't have any virtual memory for it to to it's like there's no room it's like in a tiny little closet and it can't and it takes forever to like to just turn around in it so I don't think that it's going to help to put design Cricket I could be wrong I've never tried this but I think that you it'll struggle because it's really going to save its those files its caching files it's going to save them unto your um onto your boot drive on your Mac that is the one that's filled up I don't know if that was a good explanation I tried Lori says do you find design space easier to work on a Mac or a PC well I'm biased there because I've been using a Mac since 1988 so it's a really that's like 35 years now so I prefer Mac it's what I learned on I mean like I wasn't even 20 when I started using a Mac right so a really long time and so I'm very comfortable on the Mac um that said that I don't think there's any true difference really I I am comfortable on a Mac because I use a Mac but the diff there's like no true differences other than that window that I showed you like big deal who cares it's not important I don't for for um the sake of argument there's not going to be any real difference between the two and the only reason I prefer a Mac is because I prefer a Mac in general so if you're debating between the two um and you haven't really gotten used to a Windows computer or a Mac computer honestly a Windows computer is less money so I would probably steer you in that direction Debbie says can you take a Year's break from Cricut access will your stuff stay there if you resubscribe within with the same password and login yes totally you can cancel cricet access and all of your projects will stay right saved right in there no problem and then you know a year later if you want to start it back up again you can it all be there for you it's not going anywhere i' I've got all my stuff going back years and years and years so yeah you can totally do that just know that while your Cricut access subscription is paused your projects won't go away they're still all saved they're right there for you but if you wanted to cut them again you would need to either purchase the fonts or images that were access before or you'd want to resubscribe to access so that you're not charged but you might not want to you're taking a Year's break right uh can you Debbie says can you briefly touch on X and Y AIS yes all that is here is our screen let's turn our grid back on because that's useful here um X AIS is and let's here's the X X and Y so X is just your on a horizontal plane so as I'm clicking this arrow button here you see it's moving to the the right as I increase the X and if I decrease it with the little arrow button I know my cursor is Big so you can see it but I'm now pressing on the small one and it's moving over to the left like literally X is just its position on the canvas horizontally and um Y is the position vertically that's all it is and that's also the reason why you're not going to use it very much it's just it's it's there if somehow you need to like get something like in some unusual spot honestly the only time I've ever even touched this menu other than to answer a question like this was on my Android tablet when it was really buggy which is um it's doing better now but like my sometimes my designs like I could not move them for the life of me they were just like stuck or something and like I would have had to like take everything apart to move it like move it out of position so then I used the X and Y AIS so if you're finding it difficult to move something and you don't want to take it out of position just to move it back in you could use the X and Y to you know like literally if I say right now if I change this to zero zero this should put it in the upper corner of my of my uh screen which is exactly what it did right so it's up here in the upper corner it is I don't know why my scroll bar keeps disappearing maybe it's because this is a little bit I've resized my screen a little unusual to get it to fit but let's zoom out there we go it came back but it's still Al so yeah it's still not showing me let's let's do this okay there we go I use my keyboard um so here is zero here's zero and it put my heart at Z 0 so that's like about the only thing that you might need to use it for some kind of something like that you won't use it very often but it's there if you need it it's good to know right uh Jose and Jose says can you save the projects on the computer instead of my projects on design space and no you can't export from Cricut design space if you need the functionality of being able to design outside of Cricut design space and create like files that you want to sell you're going to want to use inkscape or illustrator there's a couple others you can use too Affinity designer but um inkscape is free illustrator is not free I teach how to do both in my course called Cut Above It is not open for enrollment right now though just like Cricut College I only open it once or twice a year I only opened it once last year so um because I open it when it feels right Lori says can you only edit the text on editable images I think so I think it's just the text right um You Can't edit noes and Designs nodes would be like the way things are curved or designed um in Cricut design space if you need to get to that level again you'd want to move towards something like a vector illustration program like inkscape or illustrator Carmen says why am I missing the hamburger menu because cricet design space updated on you that's why so here is Cricut design space no hamburger menu it's gone it used to be up here right it used to be right here where I'm circling with my mouse and then there was an update a couple months ago and now that what was the hamburger menu is essentially right here so wherever your account is your name it shows up over here and everything is under here so so it moved from the left to the right it's no longer a hamburger menu for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about hamburger refers to the three lines that you'll you'll see it usually stands for settings it's just like three little lines I call it a hamburger menu because it's like the top bun the meat in the bottom bun three lines it okay so it just moved from the essentially it moved from the left to the right and now it looks like this and it's got your name on it Kathy says why are mine gray out why are slic combined Etc gr out so if you look right now mine oops let's put this away mine are also gr out right now that's because I've only got one thing on my my uh my a screen I need to have at least two layers for those to work so let's put a octagon on there and then select both of them you need to have two layers selected and that or you could have more but for slice you need two layers and look now now you can see that slice and combine and attach and flatten are all there so you probably just don't have enough layers selected for them to show up it's possible you have something else selected something an unusual layer but that's probably what it is Colette says how do you turn the grid lines on or off on the canvas I answered that one you just click right here where the two wers meet this is the easiest way click right there and they turn off Kathy says is Jennifer connected to all the am I are you connected to all of the devices via Bluetooth us b or directly great question okay so the joys can only work via Bluetooth there is no USB so these are both Bluetooth in my test my connection test these are all USB because USB is reliable and we have extension cords here because we use them all the time so yeah so the four the two explores and the two makers are USB and the two Joys are Bluetooth and that would be the way it is excuse me all right um and I think that brings us to the end can you believe this Cricket kickoff this year six plus three plus three 12 videos 12 live videos in three days that's a little bit insane but look at all the ground we covered we set up seven machines or six six six machines we didn't set this one up live I just showed it with this one right we did this we unboxed this one we unboxed so many crickets and we I'm hoping that this has been helpful to you let me know if you found this helpful I do this once a year live and then our videos are shared all throughout the year for those who need to set up their crickets and get started and get started strong that is my goal my goal is to get you like rare raring to go and there are so many awesome projects waiting for you I have those of you who signed up for Cricket kickoff will get an email tomorrow with projects for Cricut beginners to get you started and going in the right direction I have hundreds of tutorials and all of my tutorials are intended almost all of them are for beginners because I love to help beginners because you're the ones that need my help right um the people who know what to do they don't need me at all so almost everything I do is for beginners and we have so many projects and we have so many plans for the New Year all sorts of fun things to make and do and it's awesome so I I hope that I'm going to see you in my my tutorial premieres right we do a a new tutorial every every um in fact I'm going to show you a preview right now since we're at the end anyways um we're all very tired from marry maker single and cricet college so there or Cricket kickoff um so we're not going to do a project a video this Sunday and also we have all of our Cricut college students joining us so we need to conserve some of our energy for that so there won't be a tutorial video this Satur this Sunday which we usually have but we still have a project for you it is this this is a perpetual calendar have you ever seen these this is made in the Cricut I'm going to show it to you look at this awesome thing I'm going to clear out some space here so and it's for the new year so this project will debut on our blog on jennifermaker.com on Sunday so in a few days and it's a perpetual calendar so you just rotate it so what's today December I guess I should have gone the other way huh today is December 28th and look look at look at how sturdy this is this is not flimsy card stock we use craft Boo and today is Thursday look at that do you like it is this cool you can make it yourself and we used um the pen and we used paper you could also use vinyl to decorate it and you can have a calendar there's even a little stand that goes with it I just don't have it out right now um but this will be on our blog and this is just one of hundreds of projects that we share freely we love to see you make things we I don't I don't sell my my design files I focus mostly on of course we need to support ourselves and so we support ourselves through education but we love to share our files and so if you and but you know like things like this they'll just be a YouTube video so you can just watch it and make it will anyone make this isn't it cool excuse me I'm coughing all right okay and there's one question okay well I'll wrap up and then I'll ask that question okay answer that question all right so uh I think that brings us to the end of cricet kickoff I have a big mess here Let's Straighten it up a little bit and wrap up and I'll answer that last question because I know you've all got one more question for me all right so thank you so much for joining me for Cricket pick off I hope you found this useful please come join our Cricut crafters and makers group group at jennifermaker.com ccet Crafters it's an awesome group filled with nearly a million Cricut Crafters just like you we would love to have you in there get inspired get motivated show us what you're making show us your certificate it's the perfect place to post it I'm hoping that tomorrow when I get up I'm going to see lots of certificate post photos I really I really I will try to heart every single one of them and then um also don't forget about all of our tutorials coming out as I mentioned and one more thing my book I bet a lot of you already have it but just in case you don't this is the Cricut coach Playbook this shows you how to do all those things I touched on in our video step by step and it has Pages for desktop and Pages for iPad and iPhone and Pages for the Android um it has there's a lot of people who have this book nearly half a million people already have it so you might already have it but if you don't it is very useful for understanding uh design space you can get it from Amazon it's called cricet coach Playbook or you can also just go to Cricket coach.com to get a digital copy the digital copy can be downloaded over and over and then you can just download an updated version whenever you want because cricet design space does change often so that is is common I see I see I see lots of kind comments about Cricket coach Playbook I I I have a see a question about if it's updated we just updated it we're updating all the time we just updated it at the end of November it covers all the machines from The Joy to the Joy extra to the Explorers makers and the Venture and that's because it doesn't really it's not a big deal because they all use Cricut design space and this book is about Cricut design space but we still whenever there's differences between them we call them out in here and so it is all up to date all ready to go your next question will be how do you get your updated version if you've already got one because I know so many of you have one you just go back to your email from when you originally got it you click that download link again and download it um if you can't find it you can email us at hello jennifermaker.com just be aware that we're all really busy from doing Cricut kickoff so please give us a little patience to reply back to you with your download link okay it's been a I mean the holidays just happened and now you know 12 live streams in 3 days it's all it's all very busy right now so thank you in advance for your patience all right thank you all so much for joining me for Cricket kickoff I look forward to seeing all of your projects in the new year and I look forward to seeing you in a recent tutorial video or whatever fun event we might have until next time in our next video this is Jennifer maker reminding you to craft a life you love

Channel: Jennifer Maker

Views: 133,340

Keywords: setup my cricut, how to use cricut design space, cricut 101, cricut classes, cricut classes online, cricut 101 class, how to learn cricut, cricut maker for beginners, cricut 101 for beginners, cricut design space for beginners, cricut design space for beginners 2022, cricut getting started, cricut design space tutorials for beginners, cricut kickoff, learn how to use a cricut, cricut 101 youtube, how to use cricut design space for free, how to cricut

Id: Mt_erK4xYB8

Length: 160min 21sec (9621 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023