If you have a crafting hobby and like to sew and make hand craft from many material, then you must be familiar with Cricut vinyl cutter. Their vinyl cutter is portable and can be comfortably place in your work top. The design is very simple and it doesn’t take lot of spaces. With these machines, you will able to cut your pattern easily. In this article we will compare Cricut Maker and Cricut Explore Air 2 and see which one is better. Cricut Explore 2 was released early than Cricut Maker, so of course they will have some difference.
In this article we will give you information about:
– What is Cricut Maker and Cricut Explore 2
– What can Cricut Maker and Cricut Explore 2 do
– Cricut Maker vs Cricut Explore 2
About Cricut Maker
Taken from their homepage, Cricut maker is a machine that is used to cut fabrics. The company claims it can cut fabrics, leather, and balsa wood with such a great precision. It able to cut sewing patterns in just a few clicks. This will allow you to be more creative than you ever be. Many people said that this fabric cutter is incredibly versatile. The company claims that the blade is very sophisticated, it can cut any type of fabric start from the lightest silk and chiffon to thick denim and canvas.
Cricut Maker Features
Circuit Maker is a new and innovative machine. The point feature of this machine is the rotary cutter, it also has an extra deep knife blade, which is similar to a craft knife rather than cut blade. This new Rotary Blade is designed to cut through virtually any fabric, the blade is equipped with a gliding and rolling motion, which makes it able to cut fabric as easy as cutting through butter. It allows a complete control over the knife, no matter where the direction in heading at.
The other brilliant feature on Circuit Maker is the sewing pattern library. Cutting a sewing patterns is said to be one of the most difficult parts of the sewing works. Sewing pattern is a template for the pattern that you are going to sew. They made from paper and you are going to use them to trace the design on the fabric. You will have to cut the patterns before you can trace them into your fabric, pinning it and cut the fabric out, before you can finally sew the pieces.
The other feature which add power Circuit maker is the 4 Kg pressure. This new improvement is ten times stronger than the previous version the Cricut Explore Air 2. This feature offer us the level of power precision and expertise in the price of desktop machine.
About Cricut Explore Air 2
Explore air 2 is a machine that is used to cut fabrics and materials, some of them are cardstock, vinyl, paper, and fabric, as well as metals, leather and foam. For the thicker material you may need to buy an additional deep cut blade for those thicker materials. You can accessed the automatic setting through the Smart Set Dial located at the front of the machine, and used for common materials. While the custom materials selection within the Design Space Software has an additional 80 different automatic settings available in it.
Cricut Explore Air 2 Features
Cricut Explore Air is able to cut material in 12 inches wide and 24 inches long. It is surely not the biggest vinyl cutting machine available but at least it is perfectly suit the need of most hobbyist crafters. However the cutting size will diminish quickly when you use the Print Then Cut function for your own imported designs. This machine also has a built in Bluetooth connectivity.
In the software side, many people has problem with it. You can’t use any other software to pair with Cricut products, at least without doing some software hacks. The software is designed easy enough to use and even though it is not as great as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, it is still a great stepping point for beginners. With this software you can upload your design and convert them for free.
When you purchase the Cricut Explore Air 2, there are so many things on the box includes, such as basic cricut tools set, cricut cutting mat variety 3-pack, cricut portable trimmer tool, deep cut blade, cricut explore multi-pen set gold, explore multi point pens for cricut, cricut scoring stylus, and many other. The other cons beside the software mentioned above is the sound, this machine can be a bit noisy, and the limitation of the software, since it can’t be used on Android version an only work with iOs devices.
Cricut Maker vs. Explore Air 2
Conclusion
From what have been explained above, it is pretty clear that the Cricut Maker is the newer version of Cricut Explore 2. From the design you can see that cricut maker has 2 storage slots placed on the left side, while in explore 2 there is only one slots, which is the shorter one. The main important different is the rotary blade. When using Cricut Maker you don’t have to put backing on the fabric, you can just cut the fabric and it also able to cut pretty small design too so we highly recommend the Cricut Maker over Explore Air 2.
