Revealing 10 Secret Cricut Hacks To LEVEL UP Your Craft Game!

are you ready to take your craft game from here to here if so you're in the right place and today I'm going to give you 10 Cricket hacks that is going to level up your crafting game if you're new here my name is Lauren and I'm a craft producer here at makers going to learn where we strive to always bring you inspiration education and motivation to use your machine and plus we love to throw in some hacks sometimes so today we're focusing on some secret cricket hacks that you might not have known about so let's go ahead and get started first up on the list is using a lint roller to get those little pieces of vinyl hvv up and out of the way y'all I don't know about you and not just vinyl glitter as well now I'm not going to be throwing this glitter down and using a lint roller to show you how it gets up but if you get glitter everywhere you have a bunch of little vinyl pieces actually you know what I think I just um got glitter everywhere anyway so let's just go ahead and show you how quick and easy a lint roller can get glitter up and even off of your mat honestly the only way to go once again it fell over y'all using a lint roller to get all that Glitter up if you are a crafter you know what we call glitter here it's the herpes of the craft world I ain't gotten no l of tail but y'all y'all this lint roller will get rid of them herpes real quick real quick so using a lint roller for your glitter or little pieces is going to be a game changer keep one handy keep it there clean up after you're done I promise you it's going to change the game next up is one that I really wish I could show you how well it works and I know you're thinking Lauren what in the world are you doing with a bunch of tennis balls girl that's to help us put V on a textured wall did you know that you can take a tennis ball and I'm going to take a step back here and show you how you can do it this is not a textured wall but if you have a vinyl decal that you're trying to put on a textured wall grab you a tennis ball it's going to be sturdy enough but also have enough give that it's going to really help you get on there take that tennis ball rub it or roll it up against the edges of the vinyl decal and that's going to help you really get in the grooves if you are trying to put vinyl on a textured surface or a textured wall I mean who would have f it next up let's talk about layering vinyl because sometimes it can be hard to layer vinyl especially if you have a lot of static it likes the static likes to cling it to your transfer tape so what you can do to help alleviate that is layer your vinyl on your mat and let's go overhead so I can show you you so as you can see here we have our decals that we are going to be layering this is a layered egg and what I'm going to do while this is still on the mat I'm going to leave my base layer yes I do know the top of that is cut off it is fine and I'm going to go ahead and after burnishing this down I'm going to pick up my second layer and you can see now how that is not clinging to it at all and you can place that layer there pull that up and now we're going to come over here and grab this top layer burnish it down really well and now we can layer that on top of that and did you see how easy that was to layer that vinyl by using the mat as our third hand honestly guys it is in my opinion the only way to do it now once you are done if you are not ready to place the vinyl any anywhere you can leave it as is or if you have already taken the backer off but you're still not ready this is tip number three you can just grab you some wax paper you can either put your backer back on if you still have it or just Place some wax paper on the back of that design and that will keep that safe you can take it back off super easy but if you have thrown the backer away but you're not ready to place your vinyl decal anywhere just grab you some wax paper and put it on the back and you can save it for later now while we have the wax paper out let's talk about this Hidden Gem of a way to put your decal on and that is using the hinge method and some wax paper so what you're going to want to do is take your design whatever design you have and what we are going to do is we are going to line it up exactly where we want it but to keep it straight or if you have a large design I love leaving that there using this wax paper and now what I can do and this is great if you have a full design by using this wax paper and laying it down we can do what we call the hinge method now seeing that we have placed it on our blank here we've lined it up here now what you can do is hinge this back we can take that wax paper off remember it doesn't do anything and now we can grab our squeegee and just squeegee this right on down super easy our next secret Hidden Gem we're just going to flip this over to the back and that is the fact that you can use heat transfer vinyl on wood I don't know if you were aware of that but that is one of my favorite methods of putting something on wood is using heat transfer vinyl so this is heat transfer vinyl this is regular vinyl they both look great but I just wanted to show you the different methods of doing this this so we have our Cricut Mini easy press on a heat setting of two and all I'm going to do is come in here and iron this down go slow when you are pulling this up because sometimes it does take it just a few more minutes to adhere so if you missed places you can go back over but look how good that turned out one of the reasons I love using HTV on wood is because it give such a smooth effect but if you don't have the correct color that you want in adhesive vinyl just know that you can put HTV on wood and here is another really good example of us putting HTV on wood or you can put HTV on leather so many different things you can put HTV on our next secret Hidden Gem when it comes to creating designs that really stand out with your cricet is using glyphs now how you're going to do that and we'll go to our share screen so I can show you how you can do that so not all fonts are going to have glyphs that you're going to be able to use this one specifically is little lovey I'm going to show you using my name so what you're going to do type out what you want then you're going to go to either your character map if you are on a Windows or your font book if you're on a Mac from there here is font book this is what the normal font is you can see this is our standard font here but when I scroll down past all of this at the bottom is where you're going to find if this font has glyphs or not so little lovey we see does have a few glyphs let me go ahead and look at another one that may not so jot is another one you can see when I scroll down it does not have glyphs so like I said not all fonts do have glyphs but some of the more decorative fonts uh do so what you were going to do is open it up here then you're going to click on the letter that you want once it is highlighted you're going to click command or contrl C and then we're going to go back to Cricut we are going to delete that L and command or control V and copy it in there y'all look how C cute now I can grab an a command C delete that a command V and look how much better already that is starting to look so going back to my font book I'm trying to see if there's any other letters that I could utilize to make this look better we don't want to um little hang down things right beside of each other I really wish there was a different looking R but there's not and that's okay the E is cute though let's command C and pop back pop it back over here super cute and you can see how that will change and really make your design look super custom just by using glyphs next secret hacks and that is one of my favorites using slap bracelets as ways that you can can keep your vinyl together y'all roll your vinyl up whether it's regular vinyl heat transfer and pop that on there and it keeps it together perfectly now you don't have to worry with peeling tape off of there you can just slide that slot bracelet off and then once you're done roll your vinyl back up slap that bad boy back on next up and this is one I wouldn't really call it a hack but it is definitely one of those that you should be doing if you aren't and that that is if you are using thicker materials you need to make sure that you use painters tape to tape it down now the reason that we use painters tape is because it's going to come off the material so much better if for some reason your Cricut gets over here and starts cutting through it painters tape is so thin that it's not really going to change the way that it cuts but it is going to be strong enough to hold your material down but also not so strong that when you pull it up you're not messing up your blank so using painters tape versus let's say Washi or duct tape is really going to be better when you're doing a thicker material Washi is not going to be tacky enough to hold it down duct tape is going to be too tacky that it's going to tear your blank up so painters tape is the way to go when you're working with thicker material last but certainly not least is you do not have to use Cricut brand pins or markers in your Cricut Machine I promise you these will fit and if they won't let me show you a workaround so first off what you need to check first is you need to open clamp a take the pen or marker that you plan on using and see if it fits down in that adaptive tool or in that holder as of right now this one fits great you can tell that it fits great because I'm just barely pulling it up and it's not coming out it is being held very well but if for some reason yours does not fit in there did you know that you can pop this guy out it may take you a minute but you can pop that adaptive tool out and if that's the case and your PIN doesn't fit in it all you have to do add some rubber bands to the outside and this may be a trial and error kind of thing add some rubber bands to the outside of your marker stick it in there place it really close to the bottom and clamp that down and look how well that does it's not going to come up when it adds pressure to it and it's going to R beautifully on whatever design you are creating so what do you guys think was there anything throughout this video that you learned that you didn't know make sure you leave me a comment down below and if there is a hack that you have that we've not talked about we love to hear the hacks that you guys have who knows we might give you a shout out in our next hack video if you haven't already make sure you hit that Thumbs Up Button subscribe to our Channel and hit that Bell notification so that you can get notified every time we get crafty and if you want more of makers going to learn we're not just here on YouTube we actually have a membership where we bring you hundreds of new cut files every month new fonts there are 20,000 plus cut Falls in our library currently and growing every single month we add more for you guys you have commercial use license and if you ask me I think we have the best little corner of the internet with our private Facebook group and our members I'm telling you if you're looking for a crafting Community to be a part of makers going to learn is the place for you they all of our members are so supportive so uplifting and so helpful and we would love to have you as part of our community if this is you and you're not already a part of our community click that first link down below and check us out if you want to learn more more hacks with your Cricket check out this video here