How To Cut Fabric Without A Rotary Blade

Hey guys Becky here with creative Africa and I'm super excited to have. You join me today because we have an amazing qriket tutorial now, if you're, a fan of qriket tutorials, definitely make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications, because we have a lot of great ideas for you guys. But today I am going to show you how to cut fabric with your Cricut, without using a rotary blade, and on top of that, we're making this cute little hair bow. Thank you all right guys. So let's go ahead and talk about preparing your fabric to cut um really on any machine. We are going to use a Cricut with just a regular fine point blade, but you can do this um with a silhouette or other brand as well. But what you see here is, I have a um just a little plastic barrier, because we're going to spray and our fabric will be wet, but this is just a basic cotton print. Now it is a Riley Blake fabric. I'Ll be honest with you. I don't know a lot about fabric, but I have always heard that the better the fabric, the better the cut that you will get so try to start with quality, but you can absolutely go grab some cotton prints from Joann's, Michaels or Hobby Lobby as well. Now what we're going to use today, it's called terial Magic. Now, literally I buy this by the gallon. You can get it. I believe you can get it on Amazon if you have any local sewing shops here. I just re-bottle it. If you have any local sewing or fabric shops um a lot of times, they will carry it as well, but it is a fabric stabilizer, and what it's going to do is it's going to stiffen our fabric so that it cuts very similar to paper or card Stock, so I'm just going to take and I'm just going to spray. I want this to be saturated, but I don't want it to be dripping wet. Okay, so I give it a nice spray. You can usually tell once your fabric starts to get. You know nice and and saturated with the material magic, but then I scrunch mine up, I just kind of make sure you know just give it a feel. So there we go it's nice and damp. I can feel it um. I can feel that it's through and through the fabric, but it's not to the point where I'm dripping tarot magic all over the place, all right. So I actually I'm here in the Florida Sun I'm going to take that out to dry. Now, after you spray your Fabric and let it dry, then what you're going to do is spray it a second time and let it dry again so you're going to repeat this process two times and then lo and behold we have a nice finished copy right. Oh I've already preheated my now. I have my easy press here. That'S just to flatten this guy back out. Okay, that's all we're using it for today, but you can see how stiff this is. It is very much of a paper uh, even more of a cardstock texture. So what I'm going to do just take my little pressing pillow here and you can do this with an iron. You don't have to use your easy press, but I found an easy press or a heat press is just really really easy to go ahead and flatten it back out. So there's not a specific um time or temperature. Like I said it's just it's really more uh. You know just like you're ironing it so, whatever you would have your iron at and there we go nice and flat. So I could turn that back off and let it cool down and then let's talk about applying this to our cutting mat, because you can just use your regular cutting mat and you're just going to absolutely apply it now there are - and this is actually a light - Hold map, but it's a new one. There are cutting mats that are meant for um cutting fabric they're, the strong grip mats. So if you have one of those, I'm sure that would be great um, but as long as your mat is sticky enough, because this is already so stiff, it's not like the mat has to grip loose movie fabric. Okay, it's a nice tip fabric. Think of it more like you know, I keep saying this but more like cardstock and um, and it actually works really really well. So, let's bring our cutting machine over go ahead and get it turned on, and then we are going to jump over to the software and then I will come back and show you guys more about cutting fabric with your cutting machine, all right guys. So here we are in qriket design space. I'Ve just opened a new project, all right, nothing special going on here and I'm going to bring in some flower shapes for us to be able to cut now the SVG bundle that I purchased. Of course, I um linked it for you down below, but it comes with a wide variety of um. You know it's really geared towards these giant paper: flowers, but um. Absolutely. I found some elements in there that we are going to use without making giant paper flowers. Okay, so what I want I'm going to go to the SVG format. Now I've already checked all these out, so I know exactly which one I'm going to um, but I want the plus Circle: O2. Okay and what this is, is it's three different sizes of flowers that we can cut and then we're going to stack those so that they all fit together all right, so we're going to upload that select um, add to Canvas and bring it in there. So we can work with it. Now. You'Ll see that it has a little bit of text. We can actually go ahead and delete that we don't need that in there there we go and then let's go ahead and talk about our biggest flower you'll see our largest flower is around five inches and that's a pretty decent size like that's larger than I want It to be so, what I want to do is I'm going to create a circle, and I will say that we want our Circle to be about we'll, say two and a half inches all right now select all three of your flowers group. Those together, I just use Ctrl G, arrange we're going to. Oh, is that already in the front it is so. What I want to do is bring my circle front and center, and then I want to resize my whole group of flowers. So the reason that I'm doing it this way is, I didn't, want to have to try to arrange the or resize these individually, okay, so by knowing that, by keeping them grouped together, they all size together and by knowing that my bottom layer fits um relatively within This circle means that my entire flower, after it's stacked, will be no larger than two and a half inches wide okay. So once that's done, let's go ahead and click over to make it, because that's all we need to do with that file is the resizing. So we're going to choose on the mat and what I want to do is I do want to pull these away from the edges and I don't want them to be butted up against each other. Either there we go. That should be fine, they don't have to be super far apart, but just not not as close as you would be able to cut something like vinyl, okay. So let's go ahead and hit continue. The reason I don't want it butted up against the edges is because um that's where the fabric will be held down. Um the weakest, all right, there's not a lot of attachment going on there. I know that doesn't make sense, but the strongest attachment for these types of projects is going to be towards the middle, the same like for leatherette, and things like that. So if you do need to cut up towards the edge, you could just secure the edges down with masking tape or painters tape. Now I want to go ahead and go to browse all materials and I'm just going to type in fabric. I want you to see there are a ton of different types of fabric listed on here. Now we are going to use the cotton, not cotton, bonded, we're going to use regular cotton and see this is where it switches and tells you that you have to have a rotary blade, but I promised you guys no rotary blade required. So what can you choose? Instead of I'm choosing cotton, which requires the rotary blade, what we're going to use is we're going to go back to browse all materials and let's go ahead and type in printable fabric, because I know that this is a type of material that existed um. You know back when we weren't even using rotary blades okay, so I'm going to select that and see how it switches back to my fine point blade and this printable fabric is thin enough, pretty similar to our cotton that we already have that we should get really Good cutting results, okay, so, let's head on back over to our machine, and I want you to watch how awesome it is to cut this fabric all right guys so with our fabric well adhered to the mat um. Let me also say, because I didn't cover in the software, I chose a design that was nice and bold. Okay, I didn't choose anything that had thin lines. I didn't choose anything that was really intricate or delicate and that's important when cutting fabric, because it's not the same as cutting some other types of material that can handle the detail like that. Okay, so just keep that in mind, but this is pretty well adhered on. Here you could take a um, a little burnisher. You can scrape it whatever needs to be done, but just make sure it's adhered really well. Go ahead and load it into the machine now different Fabrics. Um also that's another thing with cutting fabric is that they can cut a little bit different like on different settings. So until you get unless there's a certain brand of fabric that you always use, then definitely you know, don't be afraid to do some test cuts and then also make sure you have a sharp blade. Okay, you don't want to try to cut fabric with the dough blade. A lot of people will have a specific fabric that they say or a specific blade that they say for fabric kind of. Like you have specific scissors, I don't cut enough fabric to worry about that, but it is something to consider all right. So, let's see what we have here, I'd say: we got a pretty good cut, so I'm going to unload my mat and go ahead and take out our other pieces all right guys. So here are Our Little Flower Trio here. Okay, also, I didn't mention it when I was taking them off, but it's always good to have a little exacto knife or a pair of scissors handy because just in case you get any little snags. Let me see, for example, like I had a little snag here on the tip of my petal okay um. But if you have too many snags, then it's better to just um. Maybe you haven't applied enough tarot magic. Maybe it's not stiff enough to get a good cut so just starting over and trying again, which I know doesn't sound, very exciting but uh you know. Sometimes it is what it is. So what I'm going to do. I have one of these little um snap clips and I'm just going to make a I'm going to stack this up, we're going to hot glue it together and it's going to be a little hair clip. So super cute super easy. So I'm just going to apply a little dab of hot glue and what I'm doing is I'm stacking these. So you see how my petals face different directions and then we're are going to go ahead and put another little dab right there in the middle and again we're going to try to stagger our little flower. Okay. Now we should have pretty um stiff petals here. So you can even form them a little bit just depending on your skill level. I'M not super skilled, but I also saved um just a little scrap here, because what I want to do is I'm going to close my little Barrette around it and I'm going to trim by hand okay, just like that. That way, I have a better surface to adhere my um, my flower, to okay, so a little scrap right underneath and I put hot glue on both the metal and the fabric. Okay and then I'm just going to take my flower, I'm going to put my little Barrette right in the middle, so now's the time that I would start messing with the flowers you can fold them over. You can curl them if you have any like little Jewels. You can um, you know, put a little jewel in the middle little bead something, but that is our cute little flower, hair, bow and then, of course, you'll be able to open it up, clip it and put it right back down and there we go. What do you guys think cute easy, simple, um, great way to use up some fabric scraps and to experiment with cutting fabric without a rotary blade so guys? How did you feel about learning to cut fabric without using a rotary blade? And you know this cute little hair clip, I think, is definitely a great way to experiment with that. I think it's really simple, really cute really easy to make. So if you have any questions or comments, definitely make sure you leave those down below I'd love to hear from you guys, I love to help you any way. I can and make sure to subscribe to the channel turn on notifications, maybe share with a crafty friend that way we can keep growing the channel and keep bringing you these really awesome tutorials, but for today guys I'm gon na wrap it up. I do appreciate you stopping by and we'll see you again next time, foreign