When I first got my Cricut I did what a lot of people do, I joined 50 billion Facebook groups, there seems be a lot of questions as to what does it mean to “weld” in Design Space, Cricut’s free design program. So I put together this handy post to help you know what welding is and when to use it. I’ll also show you a great little hack to make sure you don’t forget to weld when you need to!
What is Welding in Cricut Design Space?
Cricut says: “the Weld tool allows you to join shapes to create a single customized image by removing any overlapping cut lines. This can be a great way to simplify a design, keep the letters of a word connected, or combine shapes to create new designs.”
What exactly does that mean? The keyword in that description is join shapes.
Why Weld in Design Space?
Say you had two overlapping hearts and you don’t want the Cricut to cut lines where they overlap, you would weld them. Cursive fonts are the biggest thing, the font makes each letter separately even though they appear to be all connected they are actually just overlapping, so to get one one long word you would weld.
When Welding Let’s You Down
It didn’t take very long for me to run into the weird glitch when you weld in Design Space that randomly fills in stuff you don’t want filled in. This seems to notoriously happen with the letter “o” in cursive fonts. Or parts just disappear, like the tops of the letter “t”. It’s annoying to say the least. It typically happens when DS thinks they are so close together that it thinks it’s one shape. So how do you fix it with out pulling out your hair or chucking your device out a window? There is a couple things you can try:
Give it space
Since Design space thinks it’s too close the obvious thing to do is give it more space. While this almost always works it also is my least favorite since it changes the design and sometimes makes it look weird. So what else can you do?
Zoom zoom zoom
One way you could fix the issue is make the thing you are welding really big on the canvas, then weld, then resize back to the proper size. This usually gives enough space in the object for DS to know not to join them.
Partner up
This is the way I usually use. Select the thing that’s giving you issues and one of the neighboring things (usually a couple of letters for me) and weld those, assuming there is no error then weld the rest all together. This works well most of the time. Sometime I do have to play with which neighbor I weld it to but more often than not this works well.
Can You Edit a Welded Design?
The short answer is you can’t. You get the one undo after you hit weld but then your done it’s welded forever. So what if you wanted to change something later? One great hack is to duplicate the design right before you weld and then hide it. This way it’s welded for cutting and you have a little back up in case you want to make adjustments later on. Design space won’t cut anything that is hidden. Also a great way to have a few projects on the same canvas!
Welding Hack: Should I Weld in Design Space?
Ugh. I wasted the biggest sheet of vinyl working on one of my projects because I cut it only to find my letters were not welded so there was a bunch of extra cut lines. Talk about sad face. This has happened to me more often than I like to admit, until I figure out this awesome hack!
Did you know that the color of the material in design space has nothing to do with the color on the mat? You probably did, but you probably didn’t know you can use that to your advantage. The cut lines in Design Space are always black so when the material is set to black it all looks the same and you can’t see the cut lines. If you change the material color to white or a lighter color then you can see the cut lines! Now if you see black lines on things you don’t want cut you know you should weld!
Well there you have it. Welding in Design Space just got a little easier! Do you have any questions about welding? Maybe something I missed or a good tip you have? Let’s chat in the comments!