What are some things that were challenging?

It took me some time to get the hang of using the Cricut design tools. Mainly, the grid of the canvas did not appear, even when connected to the Cricut machine. I had to check the settings of the design program to revert the canvas view to an older version to bring it back. In addition, I had some mishaps regarding the size of the material to use in the machine for a little bit, partly because the mat that holds material has markings in both imperial and metric measurements depending on the side.

I also had some issues with very small details on my designs, mainly, the text on the design on the black t-shirt seen to the left. It was intended to recreate a design from a video game, so I chose the same font knowing how thin it was and expecting problems. Indeed, the letters were cut to a final size of roughly a millimetre and the letters I and T tended to peel off along with the unused vinyl material. I had to put them back in place manually with a pair of tweezers, which I repeatedly compared to watchmaking as I did so. Another issue was that the Cricut is unable to cut very fine details, as the gaps between the semi-circles of the black t-shirt design were originally much thinner and thus did not appear on the preview of what objects would be cut by the machine.

What are some things that worked well?

Larger designs, such as the bear design and the Chinese characters of the other design, are cut very cleanly by the machine without issue. I am very much satisfied with the quality of the designs as they appear after being heat pressed into the shirts. I also made use of the paper cutter provided with the Cricut tools for making clean cuts into the vinyl sheets to pare them down to the size I needed. The process of designing, cutting, and pressing overall became very straightforward for my second attempt, which was the bear design I made for my mother.

What did you learn? How can you apply this?

Aside from learning the basic skills required to use the Cricut machine for cutting heat-transfer vinyl designs, I also learned the common-sense principle of making sure all details on a given design are large enough to not cause problems when cutting or removing unused material. While the Cricut skills are nowhere near as potentially useful as the Photoshop skills I learned before, I had a lot of fun with them and plan to apply more designs to my clothing using this method, which makes for a great way to express myself through emblems and symbols from the various video games I play. The alternative here is official merchandise, which is often only purchasable online and may not have what I’m looking for specifically. In the case of the design on the black t-shirt, if any official version of it ever existed, it is no longer available for purchase. The primary limitation here is that heat-transfer vinyl can easily peel or flake off clothing, and that I’m mostly limited to images with relatively simple colours at best and a single colour at worst. The latter isn’t much of a problem, as the designs I have in mind are composed primarily of text and/or simple geometric shapes.