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

Love is a strong word... but I love my Cricut! At first when I bought this machine, I thought, Im really not all that crafty and I probably wont ever use this machine and itll collect dust just like all the big dollar items Ive purchased over the years BUT little did I know that Id start cutting vinyl and end up making a business out of it!!! I now have a steady flow of customers that buy from me on Etsy and eBay daily! Im definitely more creative than I thought I was and I actually love sitting down to design decals and cut them out with my Cricut Explorer Air 2! Even though Ive only mentioned vinyl, this machine does SO SO SO much more. I believe it cuts 100 different types of materials including vinyl but Ive had so much fun cutting vinyl decals that Ive yet to explore any of the other projects that you can make with this little work horse! So far, Im still using the original blade that it came with (fine point) and it cuts like a dream! If youre curious about this machine and would like to hear more about what all it does, go to QVC or HSN on YouTube and watch the sales videos. Thats how I first heard about it. It really does give you a good idea of what you can do with it. I recently made two heat transfer vinyl shirts with this machine as well and I get compliments on the shirts all the time! I now have a new hobby to this little work horse! Thanks Amazon for selling it to me at such a low price on Amazon Prime Day!!! Thanks Cricut for making such a wonderful product, and thank you for allowing Cricut users to use your design software FREE without having to purchase a separate license to use your Design Software!

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!

This made life crafting so much easier love it!!!!

Not worth the constant EXPENSE. Its useful but when the blades dull to the point of replacing after ONE vinyl cut, it starts to feel like a gimmick. Yes, its a very precise little cutting machine but be realistic in your expectations, you dont just purchase the machine itself. Youll need cutting mats of all grips, youll need to purchase the vinyl, or iron on sheets, weeding tools, if you iron on anything youre going to definitely need to get the iron they sell, that will need a carrying case as its expensive ceramic plates cant be banged up or youll break it, the cricut itself constantly constantly constantly runs out of the blades, its the biggest disappointment of a purchase overall Ive ever invested in, oh, did Mention that you actually have to purchase the software to utilize this thing and that is a $10 a month subscription charge! Everytime you turn around, youre having to buy more and more just to use the thing. I think that it is deplorable. Its greedy. Its beyond wrong to not make your product into a constant EXPENSE these things are not cheap and neither is any of the supplies youll need to take stock in. I wish I could have had a trial run with this before having to fully commit to this machine, Im a very artsy person, I have a million ideas and ways in which Id love to utilize the machine but dang it seems like I simply just cant afford it. Very disappointed.

Got this for my wife for Christmas and she absolutely loves it!! It is super easy to get started and she loves that you can connect your phone to it!! The machine looks great, cuts great, and has many features! The Cricut Explore Air 2 is a very high quality machine and it is very user friendly and convenient to use. Just download the Cricut Design Space app to your phone and it will get you started in no time!!

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.

This is what I would call an initial review, and will probably come back and add more as I can use this more often. I waffled back and forth between the Cricut Explore Air 2 and the Cricut Maker. In the end, because I am just a hobbyist interested in playing with a new device, I decided to go with the cheaper option. And I must say I am glad I did. Included in the box is enough card stock to run through a simple card to help get everything set up. There is no software to install on your computer; everything is run through a cloud site. You just need to set up an account with Cricut and you are on your way. I walked through the sample card and it was cut and ready within minutes. I also bought some of the Cricut brand vinyl and transfer tape from Wal-Mart, to see how well that works. I used the vinyl as a stencil for a couple wood signs, using both Apple Barrel acrylic paint and spray paint. The lines were clean and sharp, and the final product came out clean. The sign art was designed using Gimp and was imported directly to the Cricut cloud software. I do wish the Cricut came with the 24” mat, instead of the 12”, but that’s just because I have a few bigger ideas I want to do and the larger mat would be helpful. All said and done, I would definitely recommend this for anyone who is interested in working with the Cricut but doesn’t want to shell out the extra money for the bells and whistles of the Maker.

If you’re looking for a Cricut I recommend this one! It’s amazing and so easy to use

My Cricut works really well and does exactly what I want. I love the machine itself and am so glad to be able to customize so many things and give customized and unique gifts to my family because of this machine. I left a 1-star review here just a few days ago (you can see why below), but I am updating it based on an update from the Cricut leadership. Its still not 5 stars because I feel they (the company) were dishonest and only returned to the original promises after hearing the uproar from the Cricut community and perhaps over concerns of losing their base and potential legal issues. If they remain true to their word, this is a great product that Ive been very happy with. The software isnt great, but there are great third-party SVG design software programs (including a really great free software program) that make up for this. If youre willing to risk that they dont go back on their word, buy a Cricut. If you have concerns they might, there are some great competitors out there, too. **** Previous review - This WAS a fantastic product. Now, theyve changed the rules on us AFTER so many have bought the product. Its near unusable now without purchasing a subscription. This could be considered fair had they let everyone know at the time of purchase. Now some of us have spent hundreds on a machine and can only have minimal use unless more is spent on a monthly basis. There are other brands that are just as good or better. If a company does this kind of bait and switch, they cant be trusted. I would have bought the competitors brand had I known...

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.