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

Very easy to use, I use it to make shirts

Se me dañó rápido, no duró un año

I bought this machine to do paper crafts for my child. I have enjoyed making other crafts for myself with it. It is well built and relatively easy to use. If you are concerned about the noise it makes, it is not too noisy during operation. The biggest disadvantage I have found since I started using this machine is the Cricut Design Space. Quite frankly, if I were the owner of the company I would dismiss everyone in the IT department. I spend more time waiting and recreating items than I do cutting and weeding. The service is unreliable. Personally, if I have a project with a deadline I try to start it days in advance. Frustration caused by the unreliability fo Design Space for the past 8 hours prompted me to write this review. I dont know why their software couldnt be designed so users do not have to rely on their shoddy Design Space. I was contemplating upgrading to the Cricut Maker but I would be even more peeved to spend so much money and end up wasting my time the way I have been with only the Explorer Air 2. I pray someone from Cricut who cares about the reputation of their company as much as generating sales while providing customers with a reliable design space service reads this and does something because I am not the first person to complain about this. They need to do something.

very nice to work with

Glad to have found this on a great Christmas time deal ! I do wish that the ease of use on initial set up was as easy as the 4 neatly-made guides in the box touted. I am an educated person and follow directions well; however, the easy 04 steps were not able to be completed. I had to find my way through - frustrating and waste of time . They need to guide their buyers as if they have NEVER seen a Cricut machine before. I think I would have much more created by now if I had clear direction. ALSO: I do wish that I didnt have to buy an Access subscription to be a valued customer. But I am still glad to have this generation machine. Hope to tackle learning it with youtube - without having to buy anything additional.

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.

If you have any interest in arts and crafts, this is the machine for you! Ive only had my machine for a few short days, but Ive already made my first few projects and know that Ill be making them with very little in the way of training. The first project is laid out with simple online instructions and took only a few minutes to complete. Once you see how easy it is to make that project, youll be amazed at just how impressive the results can be. More importantly, youll be given a tour of the entire process, from setting up the machine to installing the software with easy instructions and with videos directly from YouTube. There is absolutely nothing difficult about taking this machine out and beginning to use it for whatever crafting projects you have in mind. I myself got the bug from having spent a few days watching a friend working from his shop where he creates all sorts of items that this machine creates with ease, from vinyl signs, Decals made from vinyl or Sticker paper, custom business cards or Birthday cards, anything you can come up with in a print shop can be made from your own home and at a fraction of the price of one made in a professional shop. Honestly, this machine can replace your needs for any local shop, unless the dimensions are your main concern, and even in most of those cases, you can still make your own vinyl signs and decals, youll simply have to limit the size to the available dimensions of the machine, or youll need to paste together larger pieces on your own. This simply means that instead of having a two foot tall logo thats ten foot long, you would need to make one foot tall segments that can be two foot long each, and simply line them up to create your own sign. Most shops that advertise with vinyl signs dont use letters larger than one square foot anyway, so youd just be making each square as an individual letter and then line them up yourself, instead of stretching one long strip to make your sign. The work isnt significantly different, so why pay multiples of the price of this machine for one sign, when you can buy the machine and make all the signs you want from that point forward? Then when you consider that this machine can work in tons of different materials, ranging from paper to vinyl, leather to copper, there really arent many limits to what you can make with this machine. With a little time and some minimal effort, youll be making arts and crafts projects that you can give to your friends and family, and sell at any yard sale or flea market within days of arriving at your house. The best part of all is that this machine is tiny. Its footprint is so small that I have mine setup on a tiny table that was no longer needed in my living room. I simply placed a towel over the table to prevent it from being scratched, and I was set. Im just now learning how to make more creative designs like custom boxes and bows, but with no time Ill be making those with ease. My only advice is that if you decide to buy one of these amazing machines, make sure you get everything youll need to explore your own creativity. Make sure to buy all the add-ons, things like the deep cut blade, the paper crafting tools, the basic crafting tools and the scoring stylus and a set of the color pens for your own messages. From there, buy some quality paper card stock, Oracal 651 vinyl in all the best colors for simple designs or for more intricate designs, making sure to buy all the popular colors such as your primary colors, but also metallic colors such as gold or chrome, get lots of black and white as youll be using those the most, and without fail, but transfer tape, lots of transfer tape, because having yard after yard of vinyl will do you no good if you cant actually place it on something, so transfer tape is equally important to your needs. Buy more transfer tape/paper than vinyl, because youll almost always need transfer tape that hangs over the edges of your vinyl cutouts so that you can layer different colors or have the vinyl decal hold in place so that you can align it to whatever your placing it on. Buy a good exacto blade knife, your going to be using it constantly if you decide vinyl crafting is for you. Id recommend you purchase a good cutting device, whether that be a guillotine style cutter or rotary cutter, make sure you buy one large enough for your vinyl or paper needs, so it will need to be at least one foot wide and long enough to cut lengths of a foot accurately. Some of those cutters dont come with a space long enough to cut squares of one foot so make sure you chose one with either an extension that will let you measure one square foot, or youll be guessing beyond the length of the cutting device itself, or youll need to mark the vinyl somehow and that will end up just eating up your time. From that point, you can decide if you need specialty materials, things like faux leather, copper foil thats normally found in rolls but also comes in sheets for use with the scoring tool to make beautiful embossed pieces, heat transfer vinyl that comes in several glittery colors or regular colors for making iron on designs that can go on everything from pants or shirts, to caps or other clothing items. They offer magnetic sheets that you can use to make magnetic business cards or decals, printable sticker paper, heat transfer jewels (bedazzle style gemstones), or any other material you wouldnt imagine needing but will find out once youve installed the software on your pc or phone, and are able to browse the online design shop. Whether your just an everyday tinkerer that needs something to fill your time, or you want to create your own small business out of your living room, this machine is well worth your time and money! Best of all, you dont have to take my word for it, just go on YouTube and research Cricut projects and youll get a sampling of exactly what youll be able to make with this amazing machine!

Having a blast using ours. We made graduation card for my niece, tee-shirt for a company bbq and decals for the cars. Having fun.

The Cricut Explorer Air 2 is an excellent piece of hardware for the money. The extra speed of the Air 2 vs the original Explorer doesnt seem to come with a compromise to the quality of the cut. The machines biggest flaw Ive run into is the software. When you are still new to the Cricut or new to crafting in general the Cricut seems like a dream come true. Once youve gotten very skilled with using the machine the software is a hurdle. Design Space is a joke. Because they didnt want to invest in software instead of the web control site they built instead, even with 16GB of DDR4 memory the design space software hits the browsers RAM limit and crashes all the time, losing all your work. It does not have an auto-save feature to help with this either. Uploading: Design space makes importing images a chore, being over simplified there are not enough tools and options to completely process a single image into different pieces for layers. Also if you dont do it all during upload, getting it done within design space will add on 3x the effort to just get a clean image you can work with. If you have a graphic that will need to be disassembled into pieces for assembly in design space, you have to upload the image multiple times and manually pull out all the details from each piece, saving them as separate uploads and then inserting them into a single project. Design Space: -Once youve gotten past the upload issues, youre in a design space window ready to create. Design space loves to eat RAM. So much so that if your design is complex, the browser will crash or lock up. If these two things dont happen, great. Lucky you. -Depending on the browser youre using the software will scale images differently on the output getting cut on the mat. So even though youve made super precise designs that all have to fit together just so...your cut is going to be in a different place on the mat that you chose, or the design is not to scale making it useless. Since there is no compensation for this in Design Space, you end up doing a lot of costly trial and error to adjust for the difference in scale. Chrome works best, IE is the worst, Safari isnt much better. -YOU CANNOT EXPORT ANYTHING. NOTHING. Everything you design belongs to Cricut and is locked into Design Space. If you want to design something in Design Space, then export that for sending to say, a t-shirt shop because you initially were going to make everyones shirts yourself, but found that it would be too large a job or inefficient on costs...too bad. Youre going to do it on the Cricut, or youre not going to do it with Cricut at all. -There are too few tools for creating free form shapes. I have been trying and trying to use whats there to make a simple shape for a vinyl side stripe for my car.. forget it. The shapes are too generic, and unlocking the L and W dimensions only lets you drag a shape out in ways that wont allow you to change an angle of a curve to make a custom shape..you can work around it with a lot, a LOT of patience and time but will have to settle for simple shapes if you dont have a pre-made vector graphic to upload. Cutting Mats: The cutting mats are really cool the way the grid more or less matches with the grid on the screen in Design Space. That said, they lose their sticky very fast for the price tag. If youre using these mats, youd better keep that clear plastic shipping cover they all come with and stick it back on after every use. I have one mat that I kept the clear sheet on it and one that I did not...the difference is night and day. Ive watched videos on how to restore the tackiness of the surface of the mat but it hasnt returned to its original tack, causing anything with a curl to peel up constantly. (like vynil from a roll..a staple of this machines worth). Youre going to need two mats minimum, one standard stick, and one light stick. (Green mat, and light blue mat). Card stock will come apart trying to use a standard stick mat, but peels off excellent on the light stick mat. Vynil on the other hand usually has a curl and needs the standard stick. Overall: This machine is still great, but the longer I use it the more I wish I had bought something that allows you to create things that dont have a Cricut logo on them. This machine is entirely focused on getting you into the Cricut ecosystem, having you subscribe to Cricut Access, and pushing you into buying Cricut accessories. I have not bought any cartridges, they seem like a throwback to the older machines, pre-Explorer. The cartridges seem like a waste of money, you get some of what youll actually like and use...and the rest, like an album CD from a singles artist, is junk youll likely not ever use. Everything thats in the cartridges are available al-la-carte in Design Space allowing you to buy them based on your project need individually..although the prices are stupid expensive for what they are generally. $5.00 for a single font choice. $10 for a project component. If youre not a designer, if youre not THAT serious about crafting and eating from Cricuts hand for content is fine for you, the Cricut is going to be amazing. If you are more skilled than beginner or have become skilled while using the Cricut and are getting more and more advanced, the Cricut begins to lose its luster. Ive spent hours and hours daily on this device with the Design Space software. Ive gone through learning from dozens of hours worth of online tutorials and youtube how-tos.. Ive bought hundreds in materials and have dozens of active projects, I am an avid user. Take that for what its worth, Ive beat this thing up and heres what I have found. Hopefully this helps someone else before they buy.

I received this for Christmas. It was easy for me to use and learn, you can use it on your phone or a computer! When unboxing it I noticed I almost threw away a pen that came with it (so if you buy this watch you don’t make that mistake). I’ve done many things with mine (cups, plates, shirts, keychains, signs, picture frames, hats, “stickers”) about 6 months of use and I can tell my blade needs changed, the Cricut mats are only expected to be used 40 times, I learned that you can wash and reuse them! With my blade I’ve worked with vinyl and leather. You can use the pen for writing or drawling! If your into crafting it’ll keep you busy!