Quick Tip Tuesday: Cutting Cardstock on Your Cricut

Hello Fantabulous Cricut Challenge Friends! My name is Sabrina Goldberg and I am hosting this week's Quick Tip Tuesday. I am also one of the new FCCB Design Team members and I am thrilled to be a part of this fantabulous blog!

I am very excited to be contributing to Quick Tip Tuesday, because I love learning tips and tricks from fellow crafty friends, and I also love passing on what I have learned.

Recently, while at my local scrapbook store, I learned a new tip from the owner of the store, Helene. Helene shared that through her Cricut contacts, she was told that one of the better cardstocks to use on your Cricut is American Crafts cardstock. I have some American Crafts cardstock, so I tried it out to see what I thought about it, since I typically use my AC cardstock for the base of my scrapbook pages. My first observation is that the AC cardstock is a solid color all the way through. I do like having a solid color sometimes (instead of the white core) because for certain cuts that are more complex and have a lot of pieces, the white showing through doesn't look as clean.

I went ahead and cut the same image with three kinds of cardstock, one being AC and the other two miscellaneous white core cardstocks. I did a regular cut and then a shadow cut. The cartridge is Joys of the Season. Here are the images of both:

AC cardstock:

Here is an upclose picture:

The AC cardstock looks very clean. There are no white pieces showing through since it's the solid color all the way through the thickness of the paper.



Other white core cardstock:

Here is an upclose picture:

The other white core cardstocks show bits of the white against the color.

In observing the machine as it was cutting, I did not see any differences between the AC cardstock and the other white core cardstocks. I do like the clean look of the solid color cardstock.

I tend to use whatever cardstock I have on hand that will work for my color scheme. When using white core cardstock, I sometimes ink the edges of the entire cut image or parts of the image if too much white shows through, or if a bit of the paper has torn.

I have been successful in using lots of different types of cardstock, but maybe next time you have a chance, try the AC cardstock, or any other solid color cardstock, and see what you think. I would love to hear your thoughts!

And one more little tip on cutting cardstock I found on http://www.obsessedwithscrapbooking.com/, came from a post back in 2008, that Joy found on the Cricut message board from Angie Duran. Angie describes the best speed, blade depth, and pressure for different papers.

Paper & speeds:

Thin paper speed - 1
blade depth - 3
pressure - 3

Cardstock speed - 1
blade depth - 3
pressure - 3 or 4

Thick Cardstock speed - 1
blade depth - 3 or 4
pressure - 4 or 5

I hope you enjoyed my first Quick Tip Tuesday! Thank you for stopping by!

Happy Crafting!

Sabrina :-)