Cricut Explore Air 2 - A DIY Cutting Machine for all Crafts, Create Customized Cards, Home Decor & More, Bluetooth Connectivity, Compatible with iOS, Android, Windows & Mac, Mint

I love my cricut, it does everything I need it to do! It took me a while to figure it out and after 30 wasted sticker sheets later, I finally figured it out and got it to work for me and my business. It was definitely a learning curve but once you buy one, stick to it and you wont regret it. The only cons cricut has is that you cant set 2 different cutting strengths simultaneously on one project like the Silhouette can. You have to go back and adjust your settings and project to perform different cut strengths which can be very tedious so I would suggest to buy a paper cutter for sticker making projects just to have if you care about efficiency. Its also rather noisy and some people complain about it put personally I dont mind. Also the program/app is kind of hard to figure out but a couple youtube videos later and I feel pretty fluent now! It also looks aesthetically pleasing on your desk and it comes in so many pretty colors! Its bigger than it looks so make sure you have lots of room for it. It also comes with a light grip (blue) mat which is BEST for stickers! And please buy a cricut tools set as it does not come with any, just the mat.

It’s everything I thought it would be.

I’m new to the whole cricut making thing and for someone who is new at crafting it’s not hard to understand and cuts nice. Definitely watch some YouTube videos over it to help and especially if your using procreate to figure out what’s best for file uploading or whatever . Pleasantly surprised Edit:took away a star because over time you have to calibrate your cricut like 5 times in order to keep your cuts accurate and clean. Just know that it cuts the borders of your print at least 90% well. Meaning that , for example if you have a puppy sticker with no white border around it, it might cut off a small section of the ear inaccurately and will have to re calibrate your cricut, and even then it’s still not 100% accurate with cutting. This is why I took away a star because it’s not only me who is experiencing this but a lot of the cricut community as well. I still love my cricut but I will have to make adjustments to my drawings to compensate.

This was my first cricut machine and I absolutely love it. I was intimidated by it at first. It sat in the box for over a month. When I finally decided to use it I couldnt believe how much it could do!! I now use it all the time! Ive had it for almost a year and no issues yet! If youre on the fence about getting one this is a great one to start with! Its easy to learn how to use and user friendly!

So far so good! Ive had this a few days and the directions to get it up and running are very easy. So far, Ive just cut a bunch of images with cardstock and some vinyl to get used to it, but it seems to be working very well. For the reviews that say that you have to pay a monthly fee to use it, thats simply not true. The software is free and you can use it on a computer, tablet, or phone. The subscription is only if you want unlimited access to Cricuts images. But they have plenty of images that are free to use, plus the Internet is full of free images. You can also make your own easily, just watch some YouTube videos to see how. But if Cricut has an image that you really want to use that isnt free, you dont need to subscribe, you can buy an image individually. There is a free two week trial of their subscription, but Im not going to use that until I really feel like I could take advantage of it.

Loved everything about it while I had it, used it for only 3 weeks and it died (red power button). Thank goodness it was still within return period. Ended up getting the Explore 3 instead (along with Amazon protection plan since Cricut doesnt seem to have great support for their machines). If you are using as a business its a great crafting tool. But for occasional crafters might get expensive as you have to pay for almost all the graphics and fonts in the Cricut design space unless you have a subscription.

I have had this machine for almost a year now, and I confidently say, THIS MACHINE SUCKS IT REALLY IS TERRIBLE DO NOT BUY IT I dont understand how they have such a high rating. Since I mostly wanted it for sticker cutting purposes here are the reasons from that perspective why this is an awful machine. First off old problems: 1. The machine never calibrates well. Even if you calibrate it, everything cuts nicely for the first few (like 1) pages only. Progressively, it gets worse and worse and you have to recalibrate it AGAIN and AGAIN wasting paper. Also, if you are cutting stickers, as you go farther down the page, the Cricut cuts it more and more off. 2. The print and cut space is tiny, at only 6.75 inches x 9.25 inches. That means if you want to print stickers you can only fit it within that space, otherwise they wont cut. Thats a pretty big area of wasted real estate, especially since sticker paper can get extremely expensive. 3. In my time of owning this dreadful machine, Cricut has done a software update that completely DESTROYED its print and cut capabilities. The designs would be consistently cut off and you couldnt fix it with calibration. Online Ive seen lots of people who have small businesses depending on these machines get completely blindsided by this update and waste hours trying to get their Cricuts to work. When I emailed the company asking them how to fix this, their response was basically, We know this problem exists. We are trying our best to fix it quickly. NOT ONLY DID THEY NOT OFFER A SOLUTION (ex. downgrading to a previous version of the software) THEY ALSO DID NOT GIVE A TIMEFRAME OF WHEN THE ISSUE WOULD BE FIXED. At the price you are paying for these machines you would expect much more consistent performance capabilities. Even worse, they had zero transparency regarding this issue and basically only confirmed it existed if you contacted them about it. 3. The software - Cricut Design Space - you use to format images for cutting SUCKS. IT IS TERRIBLE. First off, theyll randomly update it and itll just stop working until you find that one stupid setting they changed and revert it back to the original. Furthermore the blade can only cut at one pressure. This means for stickers, if you want to have sticker sheets youd have leap through so many hoops. This is because sticker sheets need two blade pressures - a lighter one for cutting out the stickers that dont go all the way through the paper and a heavier one for cutting out the rectangle that the stickers sit on that goes all the way through the paper. ATROCIOUS. New problem - A BIG ONE: 1. Cricut has announced that they will be limiting the upload frequency to Cricut Design Space to 20 a MONTH in March of 2021. THIS IS APPALLING!! Basically in order to get your Cricut to cut the design you want, you have to upload that design to Cricut Design Space. Fine tuning designs and cutlines take A LOT OF TRIAL AND ERROR. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE WORKING ON 3D PAPER MODELS. STICKERS TO A DEGREE AS WELL. 20 uploads is nothing. It will get used up instantly. Its funny as Cricut has said before Creative freedom should be free. :)))) Phew~ If youve made it this far, congrats. Honestly Cricut works fine when you get it to work, but when it only works 1% of the time and 99% of the time its mind numbingly, hair tearingly terrible, it’s NOT WORTH IT. This has been the worst purchase of my life. I did not research enough before getting this useless machine. Thanks to this awful experience, I have learned to research a lot more in depth whenever I have to make a bigger purchase. Anyways, I cant wait to sell this horrendous machine and invest in a better cutting machine. Its going to be rough doing that since I predict a lot of people will be looking forward to selling their vile Cricuts. Ive heard Silhouettes address basically every single problem Ive listed here. Before, I kind of shied away from the Silhouette Cameo as it was more expensive. But the frustrating experience Cricut provides proves its not worth it to save a couple bucks for your sanity. In terms of sticker cutting, Ive literally never seen any of the hundreds of artists I follow try to convince their followers to switch to Cricut, or that the Cricut is the superior cutting machine. Its always them trying to convince people that the Silhouette is better. And at this point, as a Cricut owner with firsthand experience of how terrible this machine is, Im inclined to believe.

Mixed feelings. I have always wanted one, so when it was on sale for only 170 I jumped on it. EDIT: You HAVE TO PAY for the Cricut service if you want any functional writing fonts. Otherwise, the Cricut will draw the letters as if cutting them out (so the letters will be hollow). See final pic. Ive had it about a week, and while I like it when it works, Im having some issues with it. *Personally, Im worried I got a lemon because it makes a scraping sound in the gears or something when its working... based on another video I saw online, its not supposed to sound like that, at least not after only a day of use. So, Im going to reach out to the manufacturer and double check with them. Tips, complaints, etc: --You MUST have transfer paper to get your designs off their base sheet and aligned perfectly onto the end result (i.e, a complex sticker with empty space in some spots will not be lined up when you try to put it by hand onto a mug). This is a bit angering for me, because transfer paper is just another chunk of plastic that will go in the trash. The Cricut already has so much waste without this (more on that later), I just hate that I have to buy even MORE product (since I bought the tools separately) just to throw even more away. --There is no consistency between material type when it comes to the dial. I used Cricuts premium vinyl for the stickers in my attached photos, and set it to vinyl on the dial, but I could barely tell it had cut it at all and when I tried to pull the designs off, they didnt budge. I figured, Well, shoot, I must have to go under custom. I did so, picking their premium vinyl from the drop-down in the program. I ran it back in--which I did before with regular old cheap sticker paper to re-cut stickers and it worked just fine--and this time it was off by about 2mm. So it totally messed up my letters. Turns out it HAD cut through the first time, because each of those little pieces were coming off as I tried to remove the letters. So frustrating on all accounts. --MATERIAL IS WASTED. You can do your best to fill the complete space with the Design Space program, but Design Space basically tells you, No, you need a second piece of material, Im not going to cut that close to the edge. If you have a 12x12 sticker sheet, and you take the time to cram all your letters and images into that space nice and tightly, AND use the attach feature so the program wont auto-arrange, it doesnt matter, because it will tell you thats too big, or it will split everything and expect you to use two mats and two sticker sheets, with 2/3 of each sheet blank. The MOST WASTE is when you use the print and cut feature. Look into it: you cant make anything actually 8.5x11. The max is like 9.25x6.25, because the program needs to draw a black line around the border of your project so the Cricut has a reference point for cutting. Thats fine, but... like, why cant Cricut just bump out the lines to 9x10? Thats PLENTY of margin. Instead, you get to waste nearly a full 2 frame of sticker paper. Turns out this has been a complaint for years, and Cricut just is not going to change it. --It does not come with a scoring tool. Frankly, I didnt even know this was an option, but if you want to get this specifically to make greeting cards, congrats, you gotta buy it separately. --People on Etsy make pen adapters so you can use markers you already have instead of wastefully buying another 20 that are specific to Cricut. Ive just ordered some, because I have literally 100 markers. So, keep that in mind before you go out and buy the Cricut marker set. --The mat it comes with is the light grip. Holy SMOKES I would HATE to have gotten the standard grip! This thing is like GLUE, and good luck lining everything up along the ruler cause if you get it crooked you will ruin a whole sheet of material getting it off to realign it. Im not joking, this happened while I was calibrating the machine. The hack to flip it over and curl the mat off the material so the mat curls instead works, but only until the last strip of material left on the mat, then that end curls. *Keep the clear sheet for the mat so you can cover it after use and reduce dust*. --You do NOT need to pay for the access in Cricut Design Space to get cute fonts. Just download free fonts to your computer and restart Cricut, and you can use the fonts that are on your system. HOWEVER.... It seems to be a bit finicky when cutting because the machine cuts each individual letter instead of seeing it as a single image to be cut, so even if you use a cursive font, it WILL mess it up while cutting. I guess thats intentional so you have to pay 10 bucks a month or 5 bucks per font to have a good cut. All in all, Ill keep it, but Im still disappointed in it.

I bought the Cricut explorer 2 air. first of all i called into the company to ask questions before i purchased the machine. i did alot of reserch online also watching videos etc...then i felt good about spending 300 dollars on all of it, and vinyls, cutting matts, cutters etc..when i got the machine in the mail and set eventually set it up. The first thin you do is create an online cricut account, put in your serial number and go to design space.com. The problem i started having is you cant download the program onto your desktop pc so in order to use the machine you have to be connected to the internet No one said anything about this: The 2nd thing is in order to use the online service you have to pay 10.00 per month No one said anything about this. So if i dont use it for 2-3 months i still have to pay right? There is some hidden things they dont tell you about before you buy this..i dont think its right to have to pay 120.00 a year to use this machine that i already purchased. if i had know any of this i would have never bought this. Im sending it all back for a refund. Beware: Update: i also purchased cutters and cutting mats that i never used, so i sent them back for a refund its been almost a month and no refund yet. im just one of the dissatisfied customers they have or had.

So this is my first cutting device (I use it for vinyl stickers) and it gets the job done. They have this simple tutorial project that gets you started and that teaches you the hardware and software basically. One issue I had was the cricut didn’t come calibrated so I had to run a calibration on it. I later moved the thing and the same thing happened. Maybe it’s about having a level surface??? Either way, calibrate once and then don’t move the thing. Otherwise you’r your cuts Won’t line up with the edges of the print.