Why You Can Trust CNET Cricut Is Launching a New Card Mat for Larger Machines
It is now much easier to make more detailed cards.
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If you own a Cricut Joy, the smallest of the Cricut machines, making cards for friends and loved ones has always been a breeze. But if you own one of the larger Cricut machines, the special mat designed to make assembling fancy cards wasn't available to you. As of Sunday, Cricut has announced it's finally releasing the Card Mat 2x2, a special mat designed to fit in full-size machines and possibly work to assemble multiple cards at once if you're up for the job.
The original Card Mat for Cricut Joy models allowed you to take a pre-folded piece of card stock and slide it in so you can do all sorts of things to the side of the card you wanted to design. It makes adding drawings, foil highlights or cut-outs to reveal an underlying accent color much easier. So if you're going to build a version of this mat for the larger Cricut Explore and Maker machines, it makes sense to support building more than one card at a time. And that's exactly what the Card Mat 2x2 does, as the name suggests you can build four cards at once.
I've been using the new Card Mat 2x2 for about a week now, and if you've ever used the Card Mat for the Cricut Joy you'll immediately understand how this works. If not, Cricut's software doesn't yet have a great tutorial but it's relatively easy to pick up. A software update allows you to select the Card Mat as the build surface you want to work in, and it's easy to click and drag your designs into the correct spots on the Mat. If your card design requires multiple tools, the software will prompt you to swap after each operation just like any other Card Mat. As long as you remember to swap out the correct tools in the instructions, you can build amazing cards in no time at all.
Cricut's new Card Mat 2x2 is available for $18 starting today at most online retailers carrying Cricut products and will be available in stores soon.