Level up your cards with this compact crafts machine
I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).
The Cricut Joy is a small, inexpensive crafts machine that can automatically cut or draw on paper, card stock, and vinyl stickers.
Cricut is a manufacturer of craft machines that automatically cut and draw on various materials, giving you the precision you might not get with your own hands while still letting you work directly with paper, card stock, and vinyl. The Cricut Joy is the smallest of the company’s devices, a $179.99 printer-like machine that’s smaller than a toaster, and able to precisely cut out patterns on several different materials. It isn’t as flexible or powerful as the company's larger machines, but it also isn’t nearly as expensive, and is a good stepping stone for getting started with computer-assisted crafts.
The Cricut Joy is about the size of a loaf of bread, measuring 4.4 by 8.2 by 5.3 inches (HWD) and weighing a dense 3.8 pounds. Its plastic body is mostly turquoise, with a glossy white front panel that flips down to reveal the material feeder and cutting/marking arm. There's a single status indicator light on top, and a port on the back for the included power adapter. Everything else is handled over Bluetooth using the Cricut Design Space app for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.
The cutting and marking arm is mounted on horizontal bars that let it slide back and forth as the feeder moves the inserted material forward and backward, like an inkjet printer. The arm itself is a plastic clamp with a flip-open lock that lets you switch out various heads, like the included fine blade head and fine point marker.
The Joy works with almost any Cricut pen, but for cutting it can only use the fine blade; more powerful and complicated cutting, scoring, and engraving heads are limited to larger machines like the Cricut Maker.
The Cricut Design Space app controls the machine, and serves as a hub for both creating your own projects and using other user-created and commercial projects with the Joy. The app lets you browse Cricut’s catalogs of crafts projects (vector art patterns for the machine to use), sorting them by various subjects, materials, and other tags. If you simply want to get started by cutting or sketching something, you can load a project, enter the material you want to cut or draw on, insert that material into the feeder, and click Go.
Cricut Design Space offers thousands of different crafts projects, but only 100 of them are free and compatible with the Joy. Most projects are commercial, and can be downloaded for a price generally between $0.99 and $9.99.
Creating your own project in Cricut Design Space is relatively easy, if slightly temperamental. You can add text and simple geometric shapes to the project area directly through the app for basic designs. For more complex creations, you can upload your own picture files. Vector graphics work best, and simple bitmaps are also quite doable. For these files, just upload them through the app, select the appropriate graphics type from the menu, then click the parts of the image you want to cut out. Don’t expect much luck with photos or complex graphics, though.
Very fine details with many colors and shades are much more difficult to work with, and you’ll probably have better luck rotoscoping or otherwise tracing pictures you want to use with the Joy before putting it in the app. Of course, unless those details are physically connected in a cutting project, you’ll need to remove and place every tiny sliver of material on the final result yourself.
The commercial Cricut ecosystem extends beyond cutting patterns. Cricut offers a host of accessories and materials designed specifically for use with the Joy and its other cutting devices. You can order rolls and stacks of smart materials perfectly sized for the Joy, like five-inch-wide vinyl sheets for making stickers and appliques. There are also material blanks for making coasters and other objects with infusible ink pens, iron-on rolls you can sketch and cut your own designs with, and plenty of card stock.
Materials like vinyl and iron-ons can be fed directly into the Joy, but for other projects you need to use the included project mat or a more specifically designed mat like the optional Cricut Card Mat. Smart Vinyl and Smart Iron-On rolls range between $5.99 and $28.99 depending on length and pattern, packs of 10 cards are $6.99 (with the specialized, reusable Card Mat another $5.99), and infusible ink coaster blanks are $12.99 for packs of two (with infusible pen and marker packs at $8.99 for three). You also might want to get Cricut’s $14.99 Starter Tool Set with spatula, weeder (an angled metal spike for picking out tiny pieces of vinyl and paper), and scraper. Of course, these tools can easily be substituted by thin putty knives, toothpicks, and plastic cards.
Fortunately, there is no copy protection or materials-based lockout on the Joy or in the Cricut Design Space app, and you can easily use your own materials out of the box with the included project mat. Just make sure the paper, card stock, vinyl, or any other materials are five inches wide or narrower, and less than four feet long.
I used a free Cricut design to make an Easter card, using Cricut’s own card blanks and the optional card mat. The card mat is cleverly designed, letting you slip the second page under a protective plastic shield so the cutter only digs into the cover of the card. The shield is slightly sticky, so when the cutting was finished after about two minutes, the pieces that were cut out stuck to the shield, leaving the cut card completely clean when I pulled it off the mat. After that, I used the spatula to scrape the remaining pieces into the trash, leaving me with a perfectly cut greeting card.
I cut a second card with a slightly more intricate pattern, and it came out pretty well. A few fine details didn’t quite cut all the way through, so I had to use the weeder to remove them. I also had to be very careful with the entire card to avoid bending the smaller details that lack much support. This is a craft tool, so you need to show a small measure of craftsmanship to get the best results.
I also made a vinyl-cut sticker based on the sacred chao of Discordia, using a pattern adapted from the Principia Discordia. The design uses a gradient in the yin-yang parts of the symbol, which doesn’t translate well to monochrome cutting. When I uploaded the file, the app cut off sections of the yin and yang, requiring me to manually erase the gradient parts of the design so the shapes would translate. After that, the symbol went through Cricut Design Space just fine, and I easily highlighted the bits I wanted cut out for the sticker.
I cut the sticker on a roll of gold Smart Vinyl, which took a minute or so in the Joy. The cut was nearly perfect, with two tiny pieces left on the sticker when I pulled it off the sheet in parts. This was easy to fix using the weeder, and after that I applied the finalized sticker to my laptop piece by piece. A very fine detail, the tip of the stem of the golden apple, was too small to remove from the sheet and apply without tweezers, but any detail larger than a millimeter came out nicely.
I then cut a PCMag logo sticker using red vinyl. The large, simple cuts looked great, though the fine points on the M and A below the big PC were a bit tricky. When applying this sticker, using a tool like tweezers to carefully place them once the main sticker is set is important.
Finally, I tested the drawing function by making a sacred chao symbol on card stock. This was a two-step process, first setting the shape to be drawn by the Joy, then placing a circle around it to be cut out. The software prompted me to switch between the knife attachment and the included pen, both of which easily slide in and out of the craft head thanks to a locking lever. The symbol was drawn perfectly, and the cut was just as precise.
The Cricut Joy is a fun little machine that lets you create intricate cards, stickers, and other crafts for just $180. The small size of the device limits the type of projects you can work on, and Cricut steers you toward using the company’s own materials and patterns, but it’s a flexible machine that can cut paper, card stock, and thin vinyl with ease, as long as it’s narrow enough to fit into the feeder. It’s much more limited than the bigger Cricut Maker, which supports multiple machine tool heads and can handle many more materials, but it’s also half the price and much easier to keep on a work table than the inkjet printer-sized Maker. So if you’d like to get into home craft projects, the Cricut Joy is an excellent starting point.
The Cricut Joy is a small, inexpensive crafts machine that can automatically cut or draw on paper, card stock, and vinyl stickers.
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I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).
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