Cutting Fabric

[swirliepants]

I have become more than addicted to my Cricut so last night I was wondering about cutting fabric with the machine. Has anyone done this and if so can you offer some tips.

[TOASTER]

I saw on the Cricut MB a post by a woman saying how she cut a T-Shirt design. She also had a PDF file about it on her blog:

http://www.psychomoms.com

Hope this helps!

[swirliepants]

thanks for that link. It is really a great help and a great site.

[cydnewright]

I haven't read the link in the other post, but I have cut quilting cotton that has been ironed to wonder-under and it worked beautifully!

[kelsie94]

There's also a conversation going on about it over at the cricut message board.

http://www.cricut.com/messageboard/tm.aspx?m=3582005

[Pvermillion]

I just finished using my Cricut to make 30 Shock Shammies (Similar to the Pittsburgh Terrible Towels). Although, I am not sure what you are using the material that you are cutting, for mine, I did it with the Heat-N-Bond so that they could be ironed on the towels. If you are doing this, I tried to leave the paper backing on the material until after it was cut and because the paper is "easy release" some of the curved letter would shift. The next set, I took the paper off the back and it worked great!!

The material I used was slighly thicker and I noticed it left some residue on my board - I then checked my cutting blade and noticed that there was some black nitting on it as well. If you are cutting a few pieces of material, I would suggest that you check your blade often to make sure it is clean.

I hope this helps!!

Patty

[swirliepants]

thanks for the tip. I can't wait to cut fabric with it. I was wondering if I needed to put some type of interfacing on the back or if I could jsut cut directly on the fabric. Looks like people do both. I am so happy with this info. Now to come up with a project to cut

[kldegraw]

The December issue of Quilters Newsletter has an article about a quilted wall hanging cut from cricut. She recomends starching the fabric to make it more like cardstock. I haven't had time to try this particular technique, but I do starch all my fabric before cutting for any quilt. Hope this helps. I can't wait to see what I can do!

karen degraw

[kldegraw]

Wow! I did it. My fabric cut perfectly, no bunching up! I purposely tried to see just how small I could cut pieces just to see what happened. Some of them were way to small to quilt, but I just had to see what happened. I starched my fabric with cheapo spray starch and used steam-a-seam 2 as the fusible. This stuff is sticky and repositionable until ironed as permanent, so combined with the sticky mat, I didn't have a problem with that. (I took off the backing paper before cutting too)..Can't wait to see what I can create now that I know this works. I think my initial problem was with the pressure, so I adjusted that to high and slowed down the cutting. Hope this helps somebody. I was pleasantly impressed.

[swirliepants]

oooo YAY! I haven't tried yet but I really ahve got to