cut any arbitrary complex design with a craft cutter

Step 5: Prepare some cardstock for the cutter

The mat that comes with the cricut has a tacky substance on it.   Be careful not to drop it on the floor, it will get coated with whatevers on the floor, like cat hair, for instance.

Lay a sheet of cardstock or bristol board on the mat and line it up as shown in the photo.   The cutter will cut your design starting from the right edge, so line the edge of the paper up over there.

For this particular sheet of bristol board, I adjusted the knife dial to the "2" setting.  At the "1" setting, it did little more than score the cardstock.

Line up the mat alongside the plastic guide and press the "load paper" button.  

Be sure to leave space behind and in front of the machine for the mat to slide back and forth as the cutter is working.

Comments

[gtoal]

Great to see the floodgates have been unlocked and Cricut instructables are appearing! Thanks, JL! Just placing a reminder here for a later instructable on how to refresh the sticky mats rather than buying new ones. Until then - if your mat dries out, another option is to spray the back of your card with something like artists spray mount from 3M.

[foobear]

that sounds good, I can how the sticky mat might get less tacky over time. Mine has already collected cat hair and little bits of paper and dust and who knows what all over it! I've no idea how to handle it. =)

[gtoal]

There are two causes of lack of stickiness - the existing glue is blocked by accumulated dust etc - that's easily curable by simply washing in soapy water and perhaps scrubbing with one of those rough green plastic kitchen scrubber things; the other is when the glue is all gone - in which case this video shows an easy fix.

[foobear]

cool, that's awesome, thank you