Cricut Classroom: Crafting Your Way to Creativity

 For all projects, we used Cricut Design Space, an application that has a canvas for users to design their own projects from scratch with thousands of images, shapes, and text options– or users can pick from many pre-set templates and designs.

For our last couple of days, we worked on making t-shirts and sweatshirts using iron-on transfer vinyl. The Cricut machine cuts iron-on vinyl in the same way. You create your design on the Design Space, program the cut, and follow the on-screen instructions for the Cricut to cut out your design. The next steps are to use a heat press to transfer the designs onto a shirt! 

We learned many other techniques such as how to “weed” our cuts; this involves using precision tools to remove the negative space of the paper or vinyl to reveal the designs. They learned how to apply designs with many colors and layers by understanding how each material works. The order of applying colors with vinyls is the reverse process of applying colors with stickers. They were also able to explore all the tools and features on the Cricut Design Space.

Here’s what a few students have to say about the class:

“Cricut is so much fun. You get to make all different things. The best part is that you can make as many stickers or crafts as you want. My favorite project I made was a cow sticker that said ‘moody’. The possibilities are endless.”

“The class is amazing would recommend it 5 stars. The Cricut machine is easy to use. The collages and stickers were very fun. I made a sticker of a dinosaur head. I also made a notebook with a dragon head on it.”

“In Crafting with the Cricut Machine, we made stickers, crafts, and more. You can be so creative with it. You can be cute, detailed, or more with your work. You can also get inspired by other work. Cricut allows us to be creative. We are also doing iron-ons which lets us show our personality by wearing it. For stickers, I made a flower for my water bottle. And I made a cat on a book for my journal. I also made a plane for my cousin. I also really loved making a transfer-on shirt because I now have a unique shirt that I made by myself. It’s like if you bought a custom shirt on Amazon”