The Cricut line of machines is amazing. For a few hundred bucks, you can put an iPad-controlled industrial-grade CNC cutter in your craft room or garage. The Cricut Explore series, and the Cricut Maker are simply excellent tools for cutting stencils out of any suitable stencil material, including vinyl, mylar, or card stock.
Bay Stencil is the perfect companion for your Cricut when it comes to making custom stencils. Just upload your photo and your Cricut-ready digital download, complete with all the cut files, is ready in seconds. Here’s how it works.
Creating your Bridged Stencil Design with Bay Stencil
Building a stencil is easy if you let Bay Stencil do the hard part. Upload an image and within minutes you have a bridged, multi-layer stencil that looks great.
Uploading the SVG to Cricut Design Space
Summary of Steps to Import Your SVGs from Bay Stencil:
1. import each layer
2. group all shapes after each import
3. then select all the grouped layers together
4. scale (stretch or shrink) the layers together to fit the canvas or cut areaDON’T scale or stretch the layers independently!
-the Stencilizer
Cutting Your Stencil on Cricut
You know this part well: what’s different with Bay Stencil is that, for the first time, no critical pieces of your stencil fall out. The result is stable and strong, and paints beautifully.
Why Bay Stencil?
Why do I need Bay Stencil, if I can upload any image to Cricut Design Space? While you can convert an image to outlines in Design Space, you can’t create a bridged stencil in Design Space. (See here for tons more info about bridges.) The bridges are what holds the islands in place in a stencil of, for example, a bulls-eye (or the letter ‘O’), and Bay Stencil’s magic is in creating and placing the bridges in just the right places!
Cut with a different program?
Do you cut with one of the programs below? Find resources to help you.
- Cricut Design Space
- Sure Cuts a Lot
- Make the Cut!
- Lightburn
- Silhouette Studio or Silhouette Go