It’s time for another totally professional (not really) tutorial by yours truly! Today I’ve got another tip for creating designs in Adobe Illustrator and making them come to life with your Cricut Explore. Learn the ins and outs of scoring custom projects with your Cricut.
Click the button above to download the SVG file I used in this tutorial, if you’d like to follow along.
If this is your first time creating SVG files for Cricut, you might want to check out this tutorial to get some basic tips first.
Illustrator tools you will be using:
Compound Path
Object>Compound Path>Make
Shortcut: ⌘8
Cricut Design Space tools you will be using:
Score
Layer Attributes>Score
Attach
(Note: you will need a Cricut® Tools Scoring Stylus for this project.)
I created this tutorial in response to a comment from a recent viewer interested in learning more about how to use the scoring tool. It took some playing around to get it to work the way I had in mind; and, like always, there is a lack of useful tutorials out there. I suppose it is assumed that we (the users) want to base all our projects out of the pre-made designs they have in Design Space. But where’s the fun in that?
I hope you found this video useful! I’m definitely going to implement score lines in a lot more of my projects now that I have a scoring stylus and know how to set up my files. If you have any suggestions for future Illustrator tutorials, be sure to let me know.
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Mandee is a professional graphic designer, amateur bird watcher, and rollercoaster enthusiast. She is a wife to hardworking high school teacher and mommy to three adorable little humans. She fell in love with graphic design when she started working on a comedy website with a guy she met her freshman year of college. Design wasn’t the only thing she fell in love with, and they were married a year and a half later. She created Designs By Miss Mandee to be a place where she could merge her passion for design with her lifelong love of crafting. 7 Comments on Scoring Custom Projects with Your Cricut
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Totercs
October 26, 2016 at 12:03 pm (8 years ago)You’re awesome! Thank you so much for sharing this….. And thank you for responding to my request. Now I can make my own cutouts with scoring, using Adobe Illustrator and Cricut. I learned a lot from this single tutorial than from other various videos combined. Please don’t stop sharing your talents and expertise with us.
Mandee
October 27, 2016 at 9:44 am (8 years ago)You’re welcome! I’m so happy to hear that this tutorial helped you out. Thanks for the encouragement! It’s people like you that keep me motivated with my blog and my tutorials. ^_^
Katja - A Home for Crafts
November 26, 2016 at 8:24 pm (7 years ago)This really helped me out. I am just starting out offering cricut files to my readers and was looking for a way to include score lines. I will be posting a tutorial on just the part about the cricut workspace based on your tips and I will be linking back to this post. Thank you so much!
Mandee
November 27, 2016 at 3:24 pm (7 years ago)Sweet! It always makes me so happy hear that one of my tutorials helped someone. Glad you know how to include score lines in your files now. 🙂
Totercs
February 11, 2018 at 7:19 pm (6 years ago)Hello there again. Can you please teach us/me how to make an svg file with scoring/dotted lines in Illustrator? (The one you taught before was in two layers, then you have to go to Cricut to change a layer into scoring lines.) What I don’t know how to accomplish is to make a one-layer svg file with scoring included. In Illustrator I can make dotted lines, but once I save it into svg it doesn’t translate into a working scoring lines when I import it in Cricut (I use SCAL2). Thank you so much!
Mandee
February 12, 2018 at 8:46 am (6 years ago)Hi there,
As long as you want score lines to be included, you’ll need it to be in a separate layer than your cut lines/shapes. There is no way around that unfortunately. If you’re trying to make perforations (dotted cut lines), then you’ll need to outline your stroke (Object>Path>Outline Stroke) and make the dots a compound path (Object>Compound Path>Make), before you export it.
Hope that helps!
Totercs
February 14, 2018 at 10:06 am (6 years ago)You’re Awesome! Now I can make a one-layer svg with scoring. I did the Object>Path>Outline Stroke. Just one little problem– when I import it to Cricut every dotted cut line is cut like a rectangle or a square. You know when you cut a rectangle, it cuts its four sides? That’s how it cuts a dotted line. It’s like you’re cutting really small rectangles every time. It’s really painstaking, it takes a while to finish a few inches of “dotted cut line”.