Recently I got a Cricut machine. I've never had a sticker cutting machine before and I was super excited to get one for the ease and convenience of having something do my cutting for me (also using scissors is painful for me and it would be nice to do a full batch of stickers without that problem!)
I chose to get the Cricut Explore Air 2 due to some good reviews I'd seen online.
I've had about a month to play around with it and I love it! I wasn't too sure about it at first - it took a while to figure out how to use it for my own designs rather than the stock designs that are built into the Cricut software and I had some issues connecting the Cricut to my printer. A few Katnipp Youtube tutorials and 1 new printer later (that is a WHOLE other story which I will talk about a different day), I finally got it set up and working!
I design all my stickers in Procreate on my iPad. I like my stickers to have a white border around them, so I add this in Procreate by drawing around the design, and then send the whole thing to my mac as a PNG. I then open the exported file in Cricut. From there, I print the designs out ready for cutting out!
As the sticker paper I use isn't an official Cricut material, there is no guide for what setting I should use. It took quite a few goes to figure out what setting I needed to use for each type of cut (so far I had done a kiss-cut and full cut on both vinyl sticker paper and paper sticker paper, so that's 4 different settings I had to work out). When I say "work out the settings", I mean which setting I have the dial on when the Cricut is working. The dial starts at really light cuts and then works round to deep, thick cuts - it's all just experimenting to see which cut suits your particular needs.
It's really cool watching the machine scan and cut out your designs - it's so clever! It's quite quick too, definitely faster than me cutting stickers out by hand. The only thing I'd say is annoying it that it's sooo loud, but it only takes a minute or so, so it's no biggie.
