In order to create a layered image on Cricut you first need to log into your design space account. And in the upper left corner, there is a little box and you need to click on that box and turn your grid on.
It’s really important that you have your grid on because that’s how you’re going to line your paper up in your images so that it will cut in those spots for you exactly how and where you want it.
So now that we have our grid, we’re going to open an image. Once opened, I’m going to go over to my edit panel and I’m going to resize this image by just grabbing the resize-handle. As an example, I want the image to be fairly close to fit within a three square because that’s the size that would fit nicely on a gift card that I’m designing.
Now the grid on the screen represents the Cricut mat. The squares that you see on screen, represent each one of those. Once you have your image up, and you aren’t going to change any of the colors or anything else, you can simply proceed ahead. You can go through the design space program and it will set everything up for you.
However, in this example case, it might give me six different maps because I have six different colors that I’m dealing with on creating my project.
And since I don’t want to have to keep putting a different piece of paper just to cut one small image, I need to come up with another idea.
That’s what I’m going to show you now how to avoid.
All the parameters of this image will stay the same. But what you want to do instead, is you want to go into the layers panel. When you click on the project, it lets you select the layers panel. If your layers panel doesn’t come up, maybe you’ve defaulted to edit your layers next to you. In the upper right corner, you’ll see edit layers in sync.
Inside the layers panel down at the bottom, you can ungroup your image, which is what you want to do.
When you have ungrouped the image, you can drag each of the layers to wherever you want them on your mat and the Cricut machine will cut within a quarter inch all the way around the sides of your mat.
You should always try to put your papers so that they fit your images within a margin of at least a quarter of an inch.
The next thing I’m going to show you is how to put the paper onto the mat and then how to cut it so that finally all of these images are on the one mat instead of having to have six or seven different mats going on.
Once we have our images onto our mat and attached so that we know they’re going to stay in a certain spot for us, then we can add our colored pieces of paper.
To cut this on my mat, I’m lining these up because I can count over and down that I want my images to fit within a three by three square.
Depending upon how large the images that you’re doing, you could do the same thing. Figure out the largest piece that you have to deal with and count over.
So now we have a perfect three-by-three square that my largest sheet fits within. Then my next shape is another color piece and it also fits really nicely into a three-by-three-inch square.
You just want to make sure that if you try to put this in a smaller box to count the squares up, you’re going to see it’s going to overlap.
Then I center it within the three by three.
The next thing I do the is the same thing for this image and I do the same thing for the next image. And also for the next one, I’m going to kind of line them up, each one in its place.
The main thing I want to make sure of is that it’s sitting within a three-by-three box.
Once I have them lined up, I am able to put my paper on the mat. You are going to line them up within these grids, and then when it cuts out the paper, it’s going to stay the same. The trick for this is to select all and in my layers panel, and attach. When we do that, it will change all of the colors of the images to the same color.
Tip:
Since all my projects are gift cards and scrapbooks, made from pieces smaller than a three-by-three, I never save any piece of spare cardstock that is larger than a three-by-three.
What this does is that it allows me every time I end up with a bunch of scraps, I cut the scraps as much as I can into three by three squares, and then I keep all of these in a box.
So when I want to create a new project, for almost any project I do, I need to cut things that are going to be a little bit smaller because they’re going on a card or they’re going on a scrapbook page or whatever.
And I find that the different layers often fit perfectly on a three by three. So if I have an opportunity to save some cardstock leftover from cutting larger pieces, I cut all my scraps into three by three. If it’s much less than a three by three, I don’t even save that. I’ve found over the years that I just end up throwing them away.
I never use them. I end up with all these little tiny bits of scraps that I never, ever use. And also this saves me time because I know that these are already cut to three by three. I can just go to my box, pull them out, pick the colors that I want and be ready to put them onto my mat, particularly when I’m using this technique where I’ve attached the layers to a specific spot on my mat where I want them to go.
