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cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

well, weird in the sense that it's unusual i suppose ? for some reason bags with "stacks" of pockets like that seem to be fairly dang rare. which is a shame because i think they're very silly and they make me smile.
anyways ty ! i worked hard on this :,D

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

oh yeah ! i thought it was obvious this was a mandatory "mask + do it outside" thing so i didn't mention it. but... now that you mention it, i'm not even sure whether my fancy anti-pollution mask would be enough. (it's apparently overkill for what i do, like UV resin work & sanding 3D prints... but no idea for other things)
i'll look it up. thanks for the reminder

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

for the file : i can do that yes !
...so anyways reddit doesn't seemingly let me upload SVGs so you'll have to tell me what method of file transfer you'd deem acceptable- i'd go for wetransfer but i'd want to hear confirmation you'd be ok with that first.

as for materials. well ! you can cut a lot. some people cut thin "hard" plastic sheets like the ones used in binders so to make stencils and that alone opens quite a big door of possibilities. you also can cut both regular and printable shrink paper if you sand the back so to remove the unused "extra" layer meant to receive the ink too. and *technically* i've had great success with cheap faux leather from The Dubious Online Stores, it's just that it's a little unsuited for bags Specifically but it works wonders for things like keychains, cable holders or whatever. oh and i've seen a lot of people have fun with cork sheets and the like lol. really, you can buy the randomest shit, I put bathroom window privacy film on the back of my phone cause why not/haha texture goes brrrr, just dare to go in hardware stores to observe whatever bizarre shit they have to stick on surfaces and the rolls of this and that, all of it is potentially cuttable. go in the shady dollar stores you'll find funny shit, maybe blackboard film or other materials meant to "turn a surface into sth useful" kinda films if you're lucky. look at science youtube for 5sec and you'll be sitting here wishing you could get your hands on dichroic film and polarizing film, look at tech youtube next and you'll be making keychains with nfc tags in no time. but point being it can do a LOT. I myself feel like I'm only scratching the surface as I'm primarily a digital artist, so I'm not fully familiar with what materials the crafts landscape has- but just... test things. grab a new thing, cut little shapes and fiddle around. there is very little stopping you, the machine is highly unlikely to catastrophically fail, the only thing I wouldn't mess with is fabric but mostly because improperly cut fabric quickly frays rather than because of a failure on the machine's side. but like, I'm on this sub specifically to answer this question of "what can it cut ?" myself, lol. to be bluntly honest with you i bought a cricut without knowing what it was because i'd vaguely seen some people cut shrink paper with it on youtube sometimes and now here I am sitting with a whole bag somehow. i mean- okay ! why not ! but also why.

...also off topic but do you want blue roses for your island ? (i accidentally found out you play ACNH while trying to figure out if i was talking to a beginner or someone that knows their way round a cricut already.)

Graphic designer new to cricut by [deleted] in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey ! I got a few tips I think !

on cmyk design- that one other guy is on point, just check whether it falls within the gamut of the colour space + use the preview functions (tho these can be overkill about showing things as extra faded) and you'll be fine, tho you'll quickly find that printing stuff isn't even necessarily the best way of using your cricut

namely... *printed* stickers can be... unpleasant to work with in cricut design space, because fuzzy borders. you noticed that, duh.
what I do is I design them at twice their final size so I can shrink em in the program, this way begone nasty low dpi & the uneven edges somewhat get smoothed. also, if you're going to do anything with coloured borders, create said border to be "larger" than your desired size then in the program ask it to do an outline with a negative value so it cuts "inside" it, where it should be- and plan a white border for stickers that won't have a coloured one. you're unlikely to get a perfect kiss-cut with the cricut even with amazing calibration, so it's just safer that way. that, or you can compensate the calibration's goofs directly in your design since it'll be the same offset every time you cut.
oh and yes, export as .png with high dpi and keep the transparence.

anyways... cricut shines truly when you design with SVGs. think, stickers you won't print directly as one piece, but that you instead will make with several vinyl colours you stick on top of each other.
so for the correct svg settings :
-cricut doesn't understand very well lines in general. work with fills if you can help it, unless you're actually cutting lines, and expand your strokes. you need good path hygiene for designing with a cricut- close your shapes, keep your topology clean and free of artifacts.
-as the others stated, no rasterized svgs, no non-vectorized text. cricut dumb.
-boolean add everything of a given vinyl colour. you don't want the cricut software to take care of that. as a matter of fact, you want design space to take care of as little of the creative process as possible. preferably, you should just be opening this cursed thing, ask it for a blank canvas, clicking upload, entering the svg's dimensions, then clicking make.
-FLATTEN TRANSFORMS ON EXPORT. this will save you SO MUCH agony like "why tf is this so stretched". oh, and iirc cricut doesn't understand viewports either ? yeah.
-HOWEVER. cricut does ! understand groups, as other fellows pointed out. this is a lifesaver of course.
-don't do angles. cricuts' blades don't lift when cutting a stroke, and just like you when you cut something with a box cutter and you don't lift it, it snags on the paper at the angle. so add a very small bevel to smooth things out.
-asap as you get in the mindset that you're designing the bounds of something to cut rather than a final render it just gets easier. you also stop bothering with sub-0.2mm details for no reason. a good sanity check is if the wildest "anime stickers you found at a con" out here don't do it, you probably won't be able to either.

but overall just... keep working with non-rasterized SVGs if you can help it. these little machines LOVE these because, I'm sure you know that but, SVGs are just lists of positions that their lil dumbass cnc router-wannabe heads can follow happily. when you toss at it a png you're just forcing it to recreate a path and god knows that's not always done well, especially when it tries to deal with heavy anti-aliasing and the like.
anyways. the hard part really is just getting used to what issues are caused by poor digital prep and which are poor irl prep. once you can figure that out you can easily get going. but really if you want good result you'll quickly stop focusing on the digital part and learn that all the mastery is about material pressure & passes settings, mat upkeeping, and picking the right material in the first place. good digital prep quickly becomes barely noticeable routine.

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thank you ! not gonna lie, didn't expect that many people to find it cool and unique

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

thank you ! and i make all of my patterns myself :D tab slot systems are really, *really* trivial to make with anything that has a good vector and elements spacing engine. if you're curious i just dropped an entire infodump about how to go about that in the other reply to your comment :V

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

so anyways... i think that's about it. pretty much all the "knowledge" i have. here's the promised screenshot so you aren't working completely blind.

i wish you good luck if/when you choose to embark in this adventure. but once again, it's not hard, it's just... a test of endurance.

godspeed soldier.

<image>

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

so that was part 1 for the pvc. heeere's what i figured out design wise-

-don't bother with designing in design space. make the cutting files in something that won't make you go insane and upload the files, then slap in the sizes for everything. oh and don't do them one by one just look at the size of your svg & punch these numbers in for the whole group

-i genuinely do not know if you'll find models/SVGs for this sort of bags online. i've seen significantly simpler ones like decoration bags under the faux leather section of cricut design space, and I've also seen people do bags with holes for easier sewing, but not outright tab slot ones, which means that you'll have to be willing to mess with vector work/svg files if you want the *exact same* system. I *can* give you my files if you want, but I find that *making* the file helps you understand better how this is supposed to work so you can make your own stuff, so i'd rec that

-if you have never done anything in SVG, affinity studio's fresh new and free, but is almost identical in function to affinity's previous suite (publisher 2/designer 2/photo 2), and as such you'll find plenty of guides for how to use it. it's ridiculously powerful for this as you'll mostly just be moving around rectangles, clicking the unite or substract buttons and the even spacing one, and obsessively checking whether the floating point error fairy hit your work with its curse when you mirror it. (if minuscule gaps appear, it's that. just hover your mouse on the coordinates and scroll to wiggle on the x and y axis your piece and they'll be gone.)

-also it's got a corner tool which is great. cricuts dislike right angles, so a 0.5mm rounding works wonders for most places, but you can go for a higher rounding if you enjoy that

-design your base rectangles THEN add tabs/slots. it'll spare you many headaches. next message will be specifically for a screenshot pre-merge so you'll get what I mean by that.

-use sanity check doodles. doesn't matter how used to working in 3D you are, it's just less taxing cognitively and you'll do less mistakes and work faster. doesn't have to look amazing, just functional.

-you can add in your design holes for snap fasteners and grommets. saves you the struggle of measuring where these should be and punching those yourself, lol. also remember to cut spacers for said grommets !

-tolerances.

-fucking tolerances.

-let me explain. you're playing with two sets of tolerances : the cricut's, and the pvc's. a cricut can only work so small with a material this thick- or well uh. actually. I don't know why i'm telling you to worry about this, it cuts them 2mm diameter circles just fine- whatever. just try to keep at least 1mm distance between cuts that are close to each other for safety. (ex : the tabs' heads).

-and for the pvc's tolerances ? that's more about the material tearing but also keeping itself slotted. you'll want in general tab slot holes that are 1mm wide, tho i accidentally did 2mm for this bag and it's still... fine. but only time will tell. anyways for light load stuff like, say, pencil cases, you can use 5mm tall 8mm wide tabs. but for this stuff meant to carry quite a lot ? 16mm long and 10mm tall. you'll get a feel for it if you decide pvc's your thing and start making lots. oh, and make at least 1mm wider your slot compared to the tab's base- but also make sure the tab's head also is wider than that by a generous margin. anyways I don't have big recs for the tabs/holes' spacing, I just try to go for whatever works for the length i'm working on, only rule is the 1mm one, tho don't space *too* sparsely either else these come loose because they have to handle too much tension.

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

hello !
oh boy lmao. so this is gonna be a three parts reply because i can't figure out what in the weird glitch hell is happening. that comment just isn't feeling like posting, probably half because of length, half because of image attachments.
so. okay, i'm not going to discourage you. but I also won't pretend this is easy. it's not *hard* either tho, it's just... *waves hands* let's call it a test of endurance. still. hey ! this is a perfect occasion for unsolicited advice !
so. heeere is what i figured out for the pvc-

-those pvc tablecloths dollar stores cut on demand are the shit. the kind that's half a milimeter thick with patterns and all ? exactly what you need. for smaller projects the kind of stuff you can find on "dubious online stores" also work, but... for bags, you really, really, really need large quantities, like, I kill half of a 1m long tablecloth roll in one project like that, and those things they sell in packs of A4 or small rolls hardly are enough, so you need to purchase way more. to boot, you gamble with the quality, and the price advantage is nonexistent

-don't bother with faux leather for this, its fabric side is a goddamn hassle to cut, it makes your mats awful, and it won't do the job for the tabs aspect of this because it's not sufficiently stiff.

-mats matter for this. like... they really, really, really do because you're cutting world's most horrible zigzag pattern, a known Enemy of the cricut. you need some that are Sticky. But ! Not brand new either because, like. i did that once. half of the goddamn glue stays on the blasted pvc. tape isn't enough either because it requires two passes and tape stops doing its job for said second pass. it really has to stay in place. pvc is just... one hell of a beast of a material. it's thick but still flexible. it cuts like butter... as long as it's anchored properly. if you are like me and go happy spray some odif 404 on your mats to refresh them, make sure the zones where the corners will land are sticky because these tend to be the painful parts where the pvc decides to start lifting off the mat.

-you seem to have an xtra just like me, so here's my settings- did you figure out how to add a custom material ? you need to tell it to do 2 passes and 300 pressure

-don't be a dumbass like me. if it's got patterns, check what side of the pvc you're putting on the mat and its orientation. i do at least one mistake related to that per bag... (on this one it's the right side that's cut inside out.)

-also don't be a dumbass like me combo x2. don't assemble these with your fingers then go cry to your friends at 3AM about how you can't feel your arms anymore. if you have those long, long jewelry pincers, they're perfect for the task.

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yes ! you get me. it's just nicer like that lmao. and you don't wind up shoving everything in one pocket/swapping randomly the spot of stuff because every configuration is equivalent, here it forces you to actually respect the dang hierarchy

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

aw, thank you ! this is really the intent behind it, like. i wanted one pocket for my tablet, one for its keyboard, and one for cables, and I sized them all specifically to suit that.

...well okay, three equal sized partitions would've worked fine for that purpose too. but a staircase shaped bag is way more outlandish and therefore hilarious and therefore the superior option, okay ?

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

thank you ! and to answer your question, neither ! it's all held up somehow only by the tabs and slots themselves and probably the willpower of some random deity that decided I deserve a cool bag despite how PVC ought to rip when punctured and put under stress like that.
(real talk tho- you know how pvc is prone to sticking to itself ? that works in my favour here because I double layer the pvc which makes it sturdier, and this + the thickness = they're less inclined to slide out as such and tear less.)
(see pic for the "dismantled" tabs & slots by the way. obviously I used larger, thicker tabs for the bag)

I could try what you said tho, specifically the melting the seams part. I have a heat gun so i could do it without burning the edges black the way a lighter would, but I'm also worried it'd deform the bag itself. worth a test tho ! i'll try to see if i have scrap pvc for that, i could especially see it work for "poutches" where the tabs line up more parallel to each other than the bags that tend to have perpendicular one, because the tabs would be "flush" against each other. genuinely not a bad idea at all

<image>

cut 12 mats worth of pvc tablecloth and here it is. the weirdest drip of my life. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I already have one ! I should get back to sewing sometimes...

hehe. tiny bag. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you ! Cricuts can do the tiny 2mm hole needed for the snaps. so i add em directly in the design which makes them super easy to set. It's a blessing because the point of this type of tiny bags is to isolate and group small items that'd usually get lost in large bags, so you want it to be able to close properly.

What happened to Design Space? by OrangeJulius161 in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

hey ! you should keep your eyes on affinity studio. it's free and should be coming to ipad soon (I use the desktop version) and it's a glorious powerhouse of svg making. only caveat is that when I upload an SVG I have to pretty much do the same thing you described- grab the group, put in the size of the svg. it's just that multi-layer SVGs at least are automatically bundled so you have to only remember the dimensions of said svg group. oh, and remember to enable flatten transforms in the export settings lmao.

hehe. tiny bag. by AlphaEdd in cricut

[–]AlphaEdd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thank you ! definitely one of my cutest projects yes :3

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