Cricut Maker Out of the Box

So I received my Cricut Maker machine and it is a thing of beauty! It weights about 22 lbs and appears to be really well made. So many things are made from low-grade plastics, but this machine has a beautiful streamlined design and is heavy and has a brushed metal top. Nice!

So I jumped in by powering up the machine, plugging the USB into my laptop, and downloading the software. I then went to Design Space to look around and found the “New Machine Set Up’ in the navigation bar and figured that would be the ticket. However,  I ran into a problem where my laptop didn’t recognize my Cricut Maker. So I went on Cricut Chat and they immediately asked if I had set up the Drivers. Oops, no; I thought the software download would do that…..but no! So they sent me the link to the page that told me how to do this in a very clear step by step tutorial page, and even waited for me on the chat until I had it figured out (just over 5 minutes). After rebooting my laptop, the Cricut Maker was recognized and I was off and running!

So I continued with the New Machine tutorial and made the “Smile card” which was the project they had included the materials for with the machine. I didn’t put the pen in far enough (I hate to heavily push things into place) and so my card drawing didn’t come out all the way. But with a little bit more of a push I seated the pen properly and don’t expect to have any trouble next time I try this.

I signed up for a free 2-week trial of the Cricut Access. What that does for you is give you access to a ton of images, projects, fonts, etc. I’m thinking about signing up that because there are just so many fun and beautiful projects I want to try.

And that’s my first try with my Cricut Maker! It was pretty easy and user friendly. And the quality of the items I made were AMAZING. More posts to come as I work my way through learning more about my new machine.

Questions I found I had right out of the gate after making my first project which was a greeting card:

1. How long will my blades last? I didn’t find an answer to this, but everything I read indicated it depended on what type of materials are used.
2. What is permanent vinyl vs removable vinyl? Well it appears the difference is basically in the adhesive used on each type. Permanent vinyl has enough sticky to keep it there for a long time; removable vinyl is easy to lift up and doesn’t leave a sticky residue.