Cricut update + lots of sticker making!

     Hi patrons! I intended on doing a sort of follow-up post regarding my Cricut (which is an Explore Air 2) that I purchased back in September, so here we go! If you haven't seen that post, it can be found here - it's essentially my initial opinions! Between now and then I've definitely learned a lot more about the Cricut, as well as made a lot more stickers, so let's talk about it a little bit! 

     I want to start off with the negatives regarding my Cricut experience so far, and thankfully it's just summed up into two things: I'm currrently having issues with rugged edges when cutting my stickers, and a while back my Cricut was an absolute nightmare when it came to recalibrating. Let's start with the recalibrating issue because thankfully that is (magically) fixed!

Calibration Issue:

     Right from the beginning it was pretty apparent that my Cricut was a little off when it came to making cuts, but it became very very noticeable when I started printing + cutting my cat dessert stickers, as they have a pink border around the "outside" of the design. Even in adding bleed (via the Cricut design space program) there was still white of the page on some of the edges and it was :') immensely upsetting, because it just straight up looked bad. 

     You are very easily able to calibrate a Cricut (in theory) - it essentially has you print out a sheet on plain paper with a bunch of vertical and horizontal lines, then the Cricut does varying cuts on the lines and you choose which is closest to being "perfect". It's not a super time consuming process, and in theory it works, right?? Right??? So one day I figured I'd get it sorted out, and recalibrate my machine, because it'll be easy, right? :') I spend two hours calibrating my machine over and over and literally half of that time was spent getting it back to it's original state, because the calibrations were actually making it worse and worse.

     It was extremely frustrating but eventually I got it back to it's initial level of calibration, and just gave up for a while because!! what the heck!!!! SO I decided not to mess with calibration for a wHILE after that because I was confused and angry. Cut to a few weeks?? months?? after this happened... I decided to try and recalibrate my machine since I wanted my bonus stickers that were included in November's print tier to look nice, and... literally,,, I calibrated it ONCE and it was perfect. SO long story short I have no idea what happened but it's cutting perfectly now so :') if you're having issues calibrating your machine,,, I wish you the best of luck. 

Rippling Issue:

     I briefly mentioned this on one of my studio vlogs, but recently (I think this is recent, at least? I don't think my first stickers were doing this) my Cricut has been rippling the edges of my vinyl as it cuts out stickers.

     Some stickers are worse than others, and I'm not a huge fan of how this looks, but I've tried a lot of things and at this point I'm just kind of coming to terms with the fact that this is how my stickers that I sell will look?? I've tried both adding and reducing pressure when I make cuts, sharpened my current blade, bought a new blade, tried different mats, etc., and I'm really not sure why this is happening! I wish I could say I found a fix for this but I'm in purgatory with this one,, :( 

     Those are pretty much the only issues I have encountered with my Cricut so far! Both are kind of a pain in the ass but,, I guess it could be worse?? The Cricut has been very consistent with cuts and has done a really good job in cutting, though!! I'm currently trying to build some sort of stock of the designs that I know I'll have available on my store eventually, so I've made around 200-300 stickers!!

     I also upgraded my storage system for my stickers! I was initially keeping them in 5x7 photo cases, but as I was making more stickers, it became really unreasonable to store them like that. So I picked up some of these frosted containers from Target and they work perfectly!! I made some dividers out of cardstock and now the stickers are organized and easily accessible. 

     As of right now, I actually only have cat stickers (my 5 dessert cat designs and the new set of 6 "botanicats" designs) so I really want to make some more sticker designs! I still have a good amount of work to put in, both business-wise and art-wise, before I open an online store, but I'm very excited to do so! 💃

     If you've made it this far - thank you for listening to my ramblings! I hope the Cricut + sticker info was helpful or just entertaining to read. Thank you so so much for all of your love and support!! 

♡  Chrissy