The folks at Cricut were nice enough to send one of their new Maker machines along with a selection of accessories and materials to try out. All thoughts are my own.
I was really excited to try out the Cricut Maker because of its ability to cut fabric and leather. I decided to set up my machine the day our contractor and his team were here to take down the load-bearing wall for our first floor renovation – an excellent distraction from all the loud noises that were giving me some serious anxiety.
Setup was really straightforward and I jumped right in to test what the machine could do. I had just started working on a quilt for a girlfriend of mine and had been slowly cutting all the pieces out with scissors – I decided to see how the Maker would do at cutting the blocks. With some creative image manipulation I was able create a cut file from my quilt pattern and lay it out to cut seven pieces at once. In total it took about 30 seconds. WAY faster than I had been doing it with scissors.
I’m still working on the quilt, so today I thought I’d share how I made some quick fabric coasters using the Maker and some large fabric scraps.
I started by adding some random triangle shapes to a new project in the Cricut Design Space.
And then laid out some fabric scraps on my 12×12 fabricgrip mat to cut – creating a pile of different sized triangular scraps.
Once I had a selection of pieces in my main and background fabrics I started sewing them together randomly, pressing the seams open each time.
Once they were large enough, I trimmed my abstract pieces into 4.5” x 5” rectangles and quilted them on some batting scraps.
To finish off the coasters I sewed them (right sides together) to some matching 4.5” x 5.5” fabric scraps leaving a small gap for turning, then top stitched around the edge.
This was a quick and easy scrap busting project and I enjoyed using the Cricut Maker machine. I’m already thinking of more projects I can make with this machine after my quilt is done. I like that I can use it with my iPad as well as a computer.
So far I don’t have any complaints about the Maker machine – the Design Space was pretty easy to figure out and there seem to be a lot of tutorials online to answer any questions I had.
Part of me got a little twitchy about all the threads that are left on my mat (which apparently should not be scraped off) and I haven’t quite figured out where to PUT this machine when not in use (it’s bigger and heavier than I expected) but I’m sure I’ll find a solution for both!