It is not an exaggeration to say Cricut products have unlocked a creative person within me. I’ve never been good with a paintbrush or sewing machine or even digital art, but I can spend hours with my Cricut and feel like I’ve created some very cool things. With the Smart Materials I covered earlier this year with the Cricut Explore 3, I felt the upgrade created a space for everyone to make cool things way faster and with a ton more options.
If the Cricut Explore 3 is so great, why spend $100 more for the Cricut Maker 3? I’ve spent the last couple of weeks looking for the answer, and what I found was a ton of new ways to be creative.
9.0
Cricut Maker 3
$399 at Amazon
LikePremium build materials and a ton of supported tools come together to give you a reason to make something.
Don’t LikeThis machine would be a lot more useful if the Marker tool slot was multipurpose.
Everything you already love, just more of it
There are a lot of people who think of Cricut as “just a vinyl cutter” but the truth is even the comparatively simpler Explore 3 is considerably more than that. There are a ton of materials you can cut with all of the different blades available, or you can swap out the base cutting tool and do something like foil transfer onto paper or leather with a quick swap of the tools. And with a quick search, you can see people making incredibly creative things with every model Cricut. Some are as simple as a set of stickers you can put on your car or water bottle or laptop, but others can be as complicated as 3D pop-up cards using four different kinds of materials in just as many colors, more intricate than anything you’ll see on a shelf in a store.
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