One of the most difficult parts about crafting can be doing the very routine operations which you’ll repeat over and over. As you become a more experienced crafter, of course you improve at these acts, but for the beginner it can seem daunting and intimidating.
A lot of the people who come into our shop to use equipment (check over here for current operating hours and vinyl cutting machine availability) aren’t very experienced, they’re trying things out for the first time, deciding if they want to get their own machine, or looking for help from staff. We’ve been asked a lot of questions over the years so at the workshop we have materials that walk you through these routine operations (like weeding vinyl).
We’re going to start to publish those crafting guides here so that even if you’re at home with your own machine you can try things out and make mistakes in the comfort of your home! What a thought!
We use Cricut and Silhouette machines at the workshop, but this works for any style of cutting vinyl, even if you’re just doing it by hand with an Xacto-Knife.
Weeding adhesive vinyl
You’re weeding vinyl any time that you’ve cut adhesive vinyl and you have vinyl that you don’t want on your finished product. This is important because if you don’t weed vinyl, you’ll wind up just sticking an entire sheet to your material and it won’t look like anything at all!
So what you want to do is remove the negative space, this is the part of the design that you don’t want on your finished craft. A good starter for beginners is to cut out a simple shape (like a circle or triangle) and then remove the vinyl around it. You’re now left with a basic shape you can stick on something.
More intricate designs, letters, they all work the same way, but sometimes the vinyl you want to remove (like with a letter) is inside of the design. This would be like if you had a circle with a smaller circle inside of it.
As you can see, if you made cuts on both of those lines (two circles) you could weed (or remove) the vinyl from the smaller circle and be left with a ring.
If you understand this, that’s the basic principle! Let’s go into some tips to help you do it cleanly without tearing the vinyl.
Weeding vinyl tips
Keep these tips in mind and you’ll have a much easier time working with your vinyl:
- Cut off all of the vinyl you won’t be using
- Use a weeding hook to make your life a lot easier, if you don’t have one, tweezers work great. If you’re cutting the vinyl by hand with an x-acto, you can just use that.
- Don’t remove your vinyl from your Cricut mat before weeding it
- If you’re having an issue finding the weeding lines, shine a light through the back. Cricut makes a product called the Cricut BrightPad, but any bright light will work, even a flashlight.
- Beyond having a lightback, you really want to have good lighting. Pull over a reading light, desk light, or do it in a really well lit space. If you’re a nighttime crafter, make sure to have good light!
- If you’re using a Cricut with old blades or that you haven’t used in a while and you’re having trouble weeding vinyl, the cutting blade sharpness could be your issue. Try replacing the blades and trying again
Best of luck! Please let us know which tips work best for you, and feel free to come on down and use our workshop!
