Cricut Tools
Congratulations! Now that you are an owner of a Cricut, it's time to acquire all the tools to work seamlessly and stress-free.
Every Cricut plotter features an immense variety of specific Cricut tools & accessories for optimal performance, although some may be compatible across different machines.
Cricut Tools & Accessories
Find out more about Cricut toolsCricut Cutting Mats
When it comes to cutting mats, Cricut uses a very practical colour code to create all your projects with the right tools.
- The blue LightGrip mat has a light tack and is perfectly suited for all lightweight materials, such as paper, vellum, thin cardstock or vinyl. It is compatible with Cricut Joy, Explore and Maker.
- The green colour is for standard and common materials or slightly thicker materials compared to the previous one, such as heat transfer vinyl or cardstock. Once again, compatible with all three Cricut machine types.
- The strongest mat is called StrongGrip and is purple. It is compatible only with Maker and Explore and is used for thick materials and stiffer items like leather, glitter cardstock, backed fabric or chipboard.
- Finally, the pink mat is FabricGrip, specialised for crafting quality projects with all types of fabrics and crepe paper with your Maker or Explore.
Blades and Tips
In addition to quality, Cricut knows that it is easy to get confused with such a wide selection, so they designed simple codes to know which tool fits which purpose.
- Gold ā Fine-Point Blade:
This is the standard cutting blade (45Ā°). Designed for the most common materials such as vinyl (adhesive and iron-on), cardstock, paper and thin acetate. - Black ā Deep-Point Blade:
Blade with a steeper angle (60Ā°) and stronger steel. For thicker or denser materials (0.06 in (1.5 mm)) such as EVA foam, stiff felt, thin leather, thin magnet sheets and heavy chipboard. - Pink ā Bonded-Fabric Blade:
It is exactly the same fine-point blade as the gold one, but in a pink housing to reserve it exclusively for fabrics. - Blue ā Foil Transfer Tool:
Has no cutting edge. It is a metallic tip that applies pressure onto pressure-sensitive foil sheets to transfer the metallic finish to cardstock or paper. It features 3 interchangeable tips (fine, medium and bold).
The advantage of Cricut is that, since Explore and Maker are quite similar in features, they share their immense variety of tools for greater convenience, respecting the colour code.
Therefore, both the fine-point blade, deep-point blade and bonded-fabric blade work for both machines, as well as the foil transfer kit.
The Cricut Maker, being higher tier, offers more creative possibilities with an assortment of tips and blades from the range called QuickSwap. Their main feature is that all tool heads use the same housing so you can swap them much faster (hence the name) in the blink of an eye.
A total of six different tool heads for scoring lines -single and double-, metal engraving, debossing, wavy edge cutting and perforating.
Markers and Other Tools
The Explore and Maker also share the roll holder to hold your vinyls for large-scale projects and a scoring stylus to score your crafts by hand.
But the variety of tools doesn't end here!
Plenty of cutting, but let's not forget the option to write! Cricut presents a series of pens and coloured markers, water-based, non-toxic and permanent.
And while Explore and Maker share their selection, Joy is not far behind with its own selection of markers. Finishes can be coloured, glitter or metallic; the tip ranges from broad (0.04 in (1 mm)) to extra fine (0.012 in (0.3 mm)) depending on the model, and some are even compatible with the Infusible Ink series to perfect all your customizable projects.
