Review on 🎨 Cricut Explore Air 2 Mint: Unleash Your Creativity with this Powerful Crafting Companion by Heather Shaw

The Cricut Explorer Air 2 is a great value. The Air 2's extra speed over the original Explorer doesn't seem to affect cut quality. The biggest downside to the machine that I've encountered is the software. If you're new to Cricut, or to crafting in general, Cricut seems like a dream come true. As soon as you master the operation of the machine, the software becomes an obstacle for you. Design space is a joke. Because they didn't want to invest in the software and the web management page they created, even with 16GB of DDR4 memory, the Design Space software hits the browser's RAM limit and keeps crashing, losing all your work. It also doesn't have an auto-save feature to help with that. Loading: The design panel makes importing images a chore as it is too easy and lacks the tools and options to fully process an image into different parts for layers. If you don't do everything at load time, it means three times more effort in the design area just to get a clean image to work with. If you have graphics that need to be disassembled to assemble in Design Space, you have to upload the image multiple times and manually pull all the pieces out of each piece, save them as separate uploads, and then put them into a project. Design Space: - Once you get past the loading issues, you are in the Design Space window and ready to create. Design Space likes to eat up RAM. So much so that the browser will freeze or freeze if your design is complex. If those two things don't happen, great. You got lucky. Depending on the browser used, the software scales the images differently when cutting on the mat. So although you have created a very precise design that needs to match exactly, your cut is somewhere else on the rug you have chosen, or the design is not to scale making it unusable. Since there is no compensation for this in Design Space, you end up having to do a lot of costly trial and error to correct the scale difference. Chrome works best, IE is worst, Safari isn't much better. YOU CANNOT EXPORT ANYTHING. NOTHING. Everything you design is owned by Cricut and locked into Design Space. If you want to design something in Design Space, export it to send to a t-shirt shop for example, as you originally intended to make t-shirts for everyone yourself but found that it was too much work or cost inefficiency would. Poorly. Will you do it on Cricut or will you not do it on Cricut at all. Too few freeform tools. I have tried and tried to use what is available to make a simple mold for a vinyl side strip for my car. Forget it. The shapes are too generic, and unlocking the L and W dimensions only allows you to drag the shape so you can't change the angle of the curve to create a custom shape. a lot of patience and time, but you'll have to settle for simple shapes if you don't have vector graphics ready to upload. Cutting Mats: Cutting mats are really cool as the mesh is more or less the same as the mesh per screen in the design space. However, due to the price, they lose their stickiness very quickly. When using these mats it is better to keep the clear plastic shipping cover they all come in and put them on after each use. I have a mat that I kept a clear sheet on and not on the other. difference between day and night. I watched a video on how to restore the tackiness of the mat surface, but it hasn't returned to its original tackiness, resulting in whatever curls up constantly peeling off. (Like vinyl off the roll. The clamp on this machine is worth it). You need at least two mats, a standard stick and a glow stick. (Green Mat and Blue Mat). The cards will fall apart if you try to use a standard stick mat, but they show up nicely on a light stick mat. Vinyl, on the other hand, usually has a curl and requires a standard stem. Overall: This machine is still great, but the longer I've been using it, the more I wish I'd bought something that lets you build things that Cricut doesn't have. logo on them. This machine is all about getting you into the Cricut ecosystem, signing up for "Cricut Access" and getting you to buy Cricut accessories. I didn't buy cartridges, they seem to be a throwback to older machines, pre-explorer. Cartridges seem like a waste of money, you get something you really like and will use. And the rest, like a single artist's album CD, is junk you'll probably never use. Everything in cassettes is available as an option in Design Space, allowing you to purchase them individually depending on your project needs. $5.00 per font selection. $10 per project component. If you're not a designer, if you're not THAT serious about creating content and eating from Cricut's hands, that's fine with you, Cricut will be great. As you become more experienced than a beginner, or as you gain experience with Cricut and become more advanced, Cricut gradually loses its shine. I spent many hours daily on this device using the Design Space software. I've worked through dozens of hours of online tutorials and tutorials on YouTube. I have bought hundreds of materials and have dozens of active projects, I am an active user. Take it for granted, I beat this thing and here's what I found. Hope this helps someone else before they buy.