the little Joy that could | MVP Mama

As a proud owner of a Glowforge, it took me a while to get on the Cricut bandwagon.

What finally did it? The Cricut Joy AND Amazon Warehouse. Launched in March 2020, the latest member of the Cricut family, the Joy is a tiny workhorse designed to trip around with you from place to place. While sadly it does not support a portable power source, I could see some sort of ac / USB powerbrick hack in its future. It’s also much quieter than running the behemoth that is Glowforge (hear me roar!)

The Joy normally retails at $179, but it’s currently on sale at Amazon at $149 with a promo coupon bringing it down to just $129. I bought mine for just $105 through Amazon Warehouse in “like new” quality. This was a steal IMO since Amazon Warehouse usually allows returns and does a great job with describing the quality of the item so I figured I could just return it if it didn’t live up to the listed quality. When it arrived, I was not disappointed. The box was intact, the machine were completely wrapping in original packaging and the only reason I could figure out it might have been a warehouse buy is if someone returned it after just unsealing the box.

After a year of pregnancy and pandemic, I was ready to get back to being a productive member of the human race. What did this mean? Getting the house is ship shape before my in-laws come to visit us in the fall, including getting the kitchen organized to IG perfection. First on the top was getting the pantry cleaned up including all the dried staples and spices. So when I saw the Joy it was straight to goggling how I could create some modern labels to belie the bamboo and borosilicate jars I bought.

I came upon this tutorial here as a first stop and ordered some vinyl to arrive alongside the new Joy which seemed insanely easy. And now for a few gotchas…

1). It wasn’t until later that I realized temporarily vinyl is not writable so back to drawing board I went to order some of Cricut’s Smart Vinyl that their pens would draw on. The big caution here is that while this post says that they perform fairly well if wet, I had less than stellar results. So while I really don’t want to redo them all, I may be forced to go this route (see 6:35 and beyond) and spray them with a fixative before putting them onto the jars. For now, I’m holding off since I’m not sure about how I feel about the fixative being on jars of food, mostly due having a new baby in the house bringing up all sorts of concerns that were never top of mind before I became a parent.

2). Cricut is really more a die cutter (I’d never expect my Glowforge to draw for me, so I’m not sure why I thought Cricut would) than a printer, so the text comes out in “bubbles” or outline. I pretty much came to the same conclusion that Jessica’s Lee’s YouTube instructed below on how to fix this if you don’t want to just size down to avoid the bubbling, which is to color them in yourself after writing. Not Etsy saleable quality, but not horrible as well.

Jessica’s tutorial I’d definitely recommend if your jumping off point (and therefore insanely high expectations) are the popular Paper & Pear labels plastered all over Etsy.

So what the Joy does not do out of the box? Print and Cut which is reserved for its larger brethren. Can you hack it to work instead of using the write and cut method as mentioned above? As long as you’re comfortable with figuring out your own registration marks, you should do just fine. Do I have buyer’s remorse? Given my husband’s generous offer to just get me a larger model (and more importantly make room for it somewhere in the house) if I needed it, I’m good for now. I think the real solution I wanted was a laser printer in addition to the larger Cricut, but the investment of 2 new machines (and the not great health implications of housing a laser printer with a new baby in the house) is keeping me from pulling the trigger, for now.

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