If you’re like me you don’t really love having to load a new mat for every color of you design. It’s much easier to just cut several colors on one mat. But how do you do that when Cricut separates out your project by mats? Well, I’ve got a few hacks to show you how.
How to cut several colors on one mat, method one:
In this method you will proceed like normal with your project. Design everything how you want it to look and then click “Make It” in Design Space. Cricut will sort your project by color onto different mats. In my project I had 6 colors so it gave me 6 different mats. From here you will edit each individual mat. Scroll to mat 2 and select your object. Click the 3 dots at the top left and then choose “Move Object”. Now you can move the object to mat 1. Doing this will change the color of whatever object you moved to the color of mat 1. Continue this process for all of your mats until everything is on mat 1.
Once everything is on mat 1 and all the same color you will need to separate everything out by the color you want it to be and place it on different sections of the mat. Cut out pieces of vinyl and place them on your mat in relation to where they are on the screen. Once everything is laid out how you want it, proceed with cutting your design as normal.
How to cut several colors on one mat, method two:
For this method you will design everything like normal. Once you have the design how you want it, select everything and change it all to one color. In my example I changed everything to black. Once everything is all one color click “Make It”. Now you will need to separate everything out by the color you want it to be and place it on different sections of the mat. Cut out pieces of vinyl and place them on your mat in relation to where they are on the screen. Once everything is laid out how you want it, proceed with cutting your design as normal.
Method three: SnapMat
This method uses the Cricut Smartphone app and SnapMat. To begin, design your project like you normally would. You can design in on the desktop app or on your Smartphone app. Once your design is done you will need to switch to the Cricut Smartphone app. Open the app and sign in. Click “Categories” in the top left corner and choose “My Projects in the Cloud”. This will pull up all your saved projects. Select the project you want to cut and click “Make it”. Now you will see the “SnapMat” icon in the bottom left corner. Click “SnapMat”. The app will access your phones camera and you can take a photo of your mat. You will want to have all the colors of vinyl cut and sorted on your mat before taking the photo.
Now that you have your SnapMat photo you can arrange your project and place each object on the color you want to cut it from. You will need to bring all the different colors to one mat just like in method one or you can change your whole design to one solid color to begin with like in method two. Either way works great for the SnapMat feature.
Oh, by the way, I designed the Halloween Gnome file used in this tutorial. Click here if you’d like to purchase it for $1.99.
