Tips for new Cricut Explore Owners

The new Cricut Explore machine became available on the Cricut website and at retail outlets on March 15th (prior to this date it could only be purchased through HSN).  I imagine that some of you decided to buy a machine and I have a few quick tips to share.

You can find many answers to your questions on the Cricut site.  Got to the FAQ's on the Support page HERE to see all of the questions covered.

There are excellent videos about the machine on the official Cricut YouTube channel HERE and more official Cricut videos to help you with the Cricut Design Space program HERE.

If you can't find the answers to your questions in the FAQs or the videos, you can contact the support team at Cricut.

When you open your machine for the first time you will need to register and set up the machine.  The sticker inside the lid tells you what to do - plug in, connect, go to www.cricut.com/setup and follow the instructions.  It doesn't take long and you will be able to start creating as soon as you do the set up.

I want to share one problem that I had and the simple way to fix it.  The screen resolution stated as the minimum requirement is 1024 x 768.  My laptop screen resolution is 1366 x 768 but I still had problems.  I could not see the lowest part of the screen and this meant that some editing options and settings were not available to me.

I knew from watching some of the videos that the number of mats should show and there should be a way to choose material size and to mirror image items - I could see these boxes on the screen.

However, on my screen, these things could not be seen at the bottom of the page.

I asked for help and after a few conversations back and forth, I was told to hit "control 0" (zero) while I was on the Design Space page.  This reset my browser to the native size and then everything was visible on the screen.  I must have zoomed in a bit on my browser to see something larger ages ago and never changed it back.  This is an easy fix if you are having trouble seeing the bottom of the page - try this first!

Once you have your machine set up - go ahead and make the sample Thank You card.  The writing is fun to watch and the lines are so nice and even (the results look much better than lines drawn by the markers in the older Cricut machines when you were using the software).

Then - just start "playing" in the software and try all of the options to get familiar with the way this program works.  I'll have some more tips to share about working in Design Space in another post.

If you are a Facebook user,  you can also join on of the groups that has been started to connect people learning to use their new machines.  I recommend "Let's Learn Cricut Explore" (I am one of the administrators for this group)

Happy Crafting!

I am in Wisconsin and had a few issues with my internet access so this post didn't go out as planned.  I am trying to catch up with email and comments - as fast as I can.  Please let me know if you have any questions about the Explore that I may be able to help answer.

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