Back to School Cricut Basics: What is Cricut?

If you've been reading my blog for awhile you know that I am a Cricut lover. If you're not an avid crafter yourself, however, you may not even know what Cricut is. I'm going to be spending the next week going over all the Cricut basics for anyone who has been considering buying a Cricut machine or maybe someone who has one but is too intimidated to play around with it. This is not a sponsored post. I am just a fangirl sharing my love of the product. So, lets dive in shall we!?

Today I'm going to start very simple with...

At the heart of it, Cricut is a paper crafting company with die cutting and embossing machines. I'll be honest, before I started looking into buying a cutting machine for my wedding, I really hadn't heard of Cricut. While I had always considered myself a crafter, I had never really dove into paper crafting or scrapbooking and, to me, Cricut was for those people. But then the Explore happened. Before the Explore line, you had to purchase cartridges and you were only able to cut what you had a cartridge for. As a creative person, I don't like to have limitations on my creativity. The Explore changed all that. With the new Design Space software, cartridges were a thing of the past, and you could upload your own fonts, images, and even patterns!

Lets take a walk down memory lane to a time I'm going to refer to as "Before Explore". Cricut had several machines before the Explore line... here they are. 

I'll be honest, I can't tell you much about these machines other than the fact that they take cartridges which was a huge turn off for me. I already have WAY too many craft supplies to house, I can't be storing (and finding when need be) cartridges. And, to be honest, something about the old machines looked a bit dated to me. But then came... the Explore. 

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I own almost every version of the Explore (and even the new Maker!), and although they may look very similar, Cricut has made leaps and bounds with each new machine and the abilities of the new Maker are astounding!

Be sure to check back in tomorrow, I'll be diving into what you can do with Cricut!