Making an SVG for Cricut

I’m currently in Chicago, away from my beloved craft room in the UK, but I have my laptop and iPad with me, so I thought I would start creating SVGs that can be uploaded to Cricut Design Space and cut from vinyl, iron-on, card etc.

I like to use Adobe Illustrator to make my designs, but it is a monthly cost, especially if you want to use both the desktop and iPad versions, which I do. I use the Apple Pencil to do drawings on my iPad and then bring it into Illustrator on my MacBook to refine it and make it cuttable.

My first design, inspired by my toddler, was the words “Here for the snacks!”. I didn’t need to put this one into the iPad first, since it’s a text only design, so on my MacBook, I opened a new artboard in Illustrator – I like to use a square of 11.5″ in RGB format, since 11.5″ is the cutting width of the Cricut (apart from the Joy). I typed the text in 3 separate text boxes; “Here”, “for the” and “snacks!”, changed the font and sizes of the text to make them fit together.

Then comes the tricky part; making it into a cuttable line.

Select “Here”, and in the Type menu, select “Create Outlines” or type cmd+shift+O (the letter O not the number 0).

Then from the Object menu, select “Compound Path” and “Make”, or type cmd+8. I assume these shortcuts work on a non-Apple PC by swapping the cmd to ctrl, but I’m not sure and can’t test it. Let me know in the comments.

Once the text has been made into a compound path, you will probably see lines where the letters overlap – this would mean that your Cricut would cut each letter individually, which we don’t want. So you will need to find the Unite button in the Properties box under Pathfinder. This works the same way as Weld in Cricut Design Space.

Do the previous steps for all the text in your design. Next step is to create the offset, if you want one.

Select your text and go to the drop down Object menu > Path > Offset Path… This will bring up the offset dialog box.

In the Offset dialog box, you can change the Offset number to make the offset larger or smaller. You can also put in a negative number to make it smaller than the original text. I usually use a number like 0.1 or 0.05 to create a thick outline to the text. Make sure to change the Joins option to “Round” to get a nice smooth edge around the text.

The offset will appear in the same colour as the text, so you will need to select a different colour from the Properties box under Appearance so you can see the effect. I recommend using similar colours to the material you will be cutting it out of so you can see if it looks how you want it to.

Now to save it in a format to cut: SVG (scalable vector graphic) – this means it can be made any size without losing quality.

From the File drop down menu, choose Export > Export As. Annoyingly there’s no keyboard shortcut for this, as far as I know. Let me know in the comments if there is.

Choose where you want to save it, and what to call it. Then choose “SVG (svg)” from the Format menu, and hit Export. It is now ready to upload to Design Space.

Open Cricut Design Space and go to the canvas or “+” or New Project. Select Upload from the left of the canvas (or bottom of the canvas if you’re on your tablet or phone). Find your svg file where you saved it and click Open. This will bring it up as a Cut Image and give you the option to save it as something different and add tags if you want (to help find it later, I guess?). Press upload if you’re happy with how it looks in the preview.

This will bring up a page of all your uploaded files. Select the one you just uploaded and click Add to Canvas. It should look something like this:

In the Layers panel, you will have different layers for each word (or letter or multiple words depending on how you grouped them in Illustrator) and their offsets. You can resize the image for whatever you are making – make sure to resize everything together. It is all grouped as one image after adding it to the canvas, so you can ungroup to move them about separately if you want.

When you’re happy with how it looks and you’re ready to cut, in this example, I would attach the two black offsets (behind “Here” and “snacks!”), and the white parts of all the words, so that I don’t have to worry about placement when putting them on the t-shirt or whatever. I would put the black offsets down first, then the white letters and offsets on top of that, then the black words “for the” would be cut separately to the black offsets since they would be put on last. See the below image for how it would look in the layers box, ready for cutting.

NB: Make sure, in the Colour Sync panel (next to Layers) that all the black layers use the same HEX code. I just checked mine and “for the” was a dark grey, so would’ve cut on a separate mat than the offsets. I moved it to the same colour as the offsets so they all cut on the same mat.