TheCricut Joy Xtraoffers a compact, user-friendly approach to crafting without a huge investment. With all its welcoming qualities, it excels as a starter machine for those curious about Cricut’s crafting sphere. But does it improve on the previous Cricut Joy, and does it tackle a good range of materials for a modern cutting machine?
Cricut Joy Xtra
The Cricut Joy Xtra expands on the strengths of the original Joy by offering an improved cutting width and a true exploration of sticker-making, t-shirts, and wider versions of cards, decals, and tags. With an impressive cut speed of 5.65 in per second for its six-pound weight, it can tackle its potential swiftly without huge costs.
Cricut Joy Xtra Set-Up
As typical of Cricut products, the Joy Xtra offers a quick and simple set up procedure. Once unboxed, there are only a few bits of extra padding to remove before you can start with it. From there, it’s a matter of powering it on and delving into Design Space.
While Cricut’s Design Space software will guide you through the entire set up process, you’ll still want to ensure your computer recognizes the Xtra’s Bluetooth beforehand. After registering the Joy Xtra to your Cricut account, it’ll take a few minutes to update the Joy Xtra before being given the option to try out a cut sample.
As always, you’re able to opt to skip the test and dive straight into creation in a matter of minutes.
Cricut Joy Xtra Design and Technical Specifications
For those already familiar with the original Cricut Joy, the Xtra resembles it closely, albeit with a clean white aesthetic designed to help it blend in. As for differences, the Xtra now handles smart materials of up to 9.5 inches wide versus the original Joy’s 5.5 inches. This allows for a cutting width of 8.5 inches compared to the 4.5 inches of the original Joy.
Additionally, the amount of project types that the Joy Xtra can tackle has also improved. With the introduction of print-and-cut capability, a variety of stickers and printable iron-on can be done with an appropriate mat. The Xtra also can now tackle even wider cards, decals, tags, and labels.
For those upgrading from the Joy, the original Cricut Joy pens, markers, blades, and foil transfer system are all compatible. But in a similar fashion to the Cricut Venture, the Cricut Joy Xtra needs its own wider machine mats and smart materials for operation.
In terms of cutting, the Joy Xtra works with 50+ common materials and can cut at up to 5.65 inches per second . The Cricut Joy Xtra can also cut single images of up to 48 inches long or tackle repeated images up to 20 feet long when using its smart materials.
Using Design Space with Cricut Joy Xtra
While Design Space already plays an important role with all of Cricut’s cutting machines, the Joy Xtra relies solely upon it for its operation; there are no buttons on the Joy Xtra itself to interact with. Once you’ve either chosen from Cricut’s available images or projects or created your own, the initial Design Space guidance doesn’t change too much. You’ll select your materials and follow any on-screen instructions.
Once Design Space prompts you to insert the appropriate tool and material, you’ll load the material by inserting it along the guidelines. Occasionally, this wasn’t as responsive as I’d hoped, and you may need to reload the materials to detect it. Then you’ll return to Design Space to command the Joy Xtra to start on the project until you need to replace a tool, pause your project, or unload.
On the plus side, there’s little room for operational mistakes since Design Space guides you through the process. But if you do experience an error with Design Space where the Joy Xtra isn’t responding, you’ll need to restart Design Space and power cycle the Joy Xtra by unplugging it.
To get your projects going, Design Space supports and optimizes for the Joy Xtra quite well. But compared to the Venture, the Bluetooth connection of the Joy Xtra can drag a bit in its initial detection. Between this and the need to unload the material via Design Space, these are the only real notable slowdowns with Design Space when attempting to do back-to-back projects.
For most, it’s not a major ordeal; if you’re used to Cricut’s other cutting machines, you’ll want to weigh it against your intended use. But if you want to use Design Space to design fun, quick projects with the Joy Xtra without taking up a ton of table space then these won’t dissuade you from its plethora of options.
Joy Xtra Customizable Pen Touches
With the Joy Xtra, a black fine point (0.4 mm) pen is included to familiarize you with both writing and drawing in Design Space.
In further support of this, the Joy Xtra supports 9.5 inch wide smart label sheets, for a variety of easy-load label, tag, or sign creation.
To test this out, I converted and uploaded a simple custom artwork to Design Space with a mixture of text and a moderate amount of detail to see how quickly it could be produced on a larger scale. Even with a fair amount of visual complexity and line type variety, the Joy Xtra drew the design out in a few minutes.
If you’re looking to capitalize on various pen or marker types, tool changes with the Joy Xtra are quite simple. While other Cricut cutting machines require a bit more insertion pressure to get a proper lock-in, the Joy Xtra’s tools are incredibly easy to change out. This won’t really change much in practice for experienced users, but if you’re considering the Joy Xtra as a beginner machine, it makes multi-tool projects less intimidating.
Cricut Joy Xtra’s Card Cutting Potential
For those looking to make custom cards, the Joy Xtra continues to specialize there. As a reminder, you’ll need to purchase a separate Cricut Joy Xtra-specific card mat that supports a single card and measures 4.7 in x 6.6 inches. This reusable mat can tackle any of Cricut’s cards, including the popular cutaway cards.
If you’re pulling from one of Design Space’s current projects or using it as a template for your own, you’ll still follow Design Space’s guidance, with a visual note of its placement on the card mat. The Cricut Joy Xtra card mat also provides its own visual guidelines for sizing and placement for the one card that can be adhered. As with most of Cricut’s new mats, they prove extra sticky when new, so you’ll want to be a bit more careful when placing your cards for the first time.
With the Joy Xtra, you can only tackle a single card at a time compared to a 2 x 2 card mat compatible with the Cricut Explore and Maker. In practice, this continues the design focus of the Joy Xtra, which is to focus on a single craft task to make it digestible. Rather than worry about maximizing your space, this allows a user to follow Design Space’s prompts and learn about how everything works without feeling overwhelmed during the process.
The only physical annoyance that I ran into was having to move all the star wheels to the right on the Joy Xtra before beginning a job. Specifically, I found it easiest to power cycle the Joy Xtra to get the left farthest star wheels moved down when the tool holder resets its position on start-up. While a minor inconvenience, it’s an important step to take to avoid leaving track marks behind on your card projects.
To test the Joy Xtra’s ability, I cut a few different card sizes from across Design Space’s already available projects and got each done in a matter of minutes. For quick customizations, you’re able to limit yourself to cutting; you can experiment with the wide array of card colors and capitalize on Cricut’s different colored markers and pens to further personalize. Once you’re done, there’s a little clean-up for any cut elements left behind on the mat, but these can easily be plucked off by hand.
The Joy’s foil transfer kit can be used to add a unique visual flair. You’ll need to ensure you’re using the Joy variant since the Maker’s foil transfer kit won’t fit in the Joy Xtra’s tool grip.
Using Infusible Ink with Cricut Joy Xtra
Any Joy-series infusible ink sheet will fit nicely on the light grip mat. In testing, I wanted to see how well the Joy Xtra cut these sheets since infusible ink can prove to be trickier to work with for newer users, compared to smart materials.
Once the mat was unloaded, the sheets pulled off easily and were simple to weed for transfer when cut at the default pressure. Simpler designs always work best with infusible ink, and the Joy Xtra typically cuts them two-to-four minutes. If you want to test out a Cricut heat press alongside the Joy Xtra, any size and type suited for your budget can work with infusible ink.
Experimenting With Smart Iron-On and Printable Iron-On
You might be concerned that the Joy Xtra is too compact to work with. Specifically, there are some sizing limitations relative to the maximum width of the Joy Xtra. But there are a few new materials to experiment with from Cricut that’ll make you rethink what projects you want to undertake.
For blank transfers, printable iron-on for dark or light fabrics opens up many avenues for those who don’t care for layering smart materials to get all the colors they want. These printable sheets are standard letter sheets sized at 8.5 inches x 11 inches, so they’re good to fit on most standard shirt or tote sizes.
As typical with anything printed within Design Space, you’ll want to opt into using the Print Dialog box to customize your print settings for both the material type and, more importantly, better control of the quality setting. To get the best results, you need to print at the highest quality setting on your home inkjet printer. Once printed, you’ll transfer it again to a Joy Xtra mat; it’ll begin cutting out your design as instructed by Design Space.
If you don’t want to involve a printer, the Joy supports 9.5-inch wide smart materials. Cricut also offers a sample pack of different colored smart-iron sheets, so you can see how much you like the material. And you’re free to use even small heat presses like Cricut’s Mini Press if you prefer to experiment with smaller heat transfer projects first.
But while the Joy Xtra is completely capable of doing apparel customization, you may wish to look at a larger cutting machine like theCricut Venturefor more commercial applications.
Stickers Aplenty With Print Then Cut
While printable iron-on is an exciting item to test out on the Cricut Xtra, it’s a great item to create stickers with. Alongside its release, a variety of sticker options have been released by Cricut. These include gold printable vinyl sheets and printable waterproof stickers with vinyl laminate sheets.
For many, this makes for a straightforward way to print out some quick adherable customizations. Additionally, Design Space has been updated with new pre-designed stickers and various sticker sheet projects, so you may learn to make either kiss-cut or die-cut stickers per your preference.
As a more likely entry point for printable options on the Joy Xtra, this will also guide you to performing a calibration before doing your first print-then-cut job. The calibration process should prove standard for those already familiar with this process from other machines.
But if you’re a newcomer, Design Space will guide you through the process and also give you tips to make sure you’re seeing everything appropriately. And if you do have any issues with seeing the results, you can always take a photo with your phone and zoom in to ensure you’re seeing everything correctly.
When it comes to getting the best results with the Joy Xtra’s sticker cutting, you’ll want to keep a few details in mind. As with the printable iron-on, you’ll really want to get your settings perfect for the best print results by using your computer’s Print Dialog box. Depending on your sticker material and any included laminate, you’ll also get some different finishes.
If experimenting with the waterproof sticker sets, you’ll want to scan the QR code for directions either on the back of the sticker sheet package or on the back of the laminate sheet. For those used to making stickers, applying a laminate sheet won’t be foreign; it can save some headaches and potential printer damage for anyone new to this area. But if you’d prefer to avoid it, you’re able to also get some quick stickers done with Cricut’s printable vinyl sheets or the non-waterproof printable sticker paper.
Overall, there are a few easy-to-use options if you want Cricut to select the material for you; but you’re also free to try out your own sticker sheet material if you would prefer. Even at its modest size, the Joy Xtra does a great job at detecting your designs with a bit of set up work on your end.
Should You Buy the Cricut Joy Xtra?
For those considering the Joy Xtra, you’ll want to think about what types of crafting you’d like to explore. If you want a cheaper investment point to try out several popular project types, the Joy Xtra offers that. Additionally, if you want to hone your focus to one crafting area, the Joy Xtra can prove more affordable there.
But if you need access to less common material types or want to batch produce items commercially, it’s unlikely to be the best pick. The Joy Xtra wasn’t designed for these purposes, with its much smaller size and portable body. Instead, the Joy Xtra offers an excellent way to do small crafts without a heavy commitment or large workshop space.
Overall, the Joy Xtra introduces more versatility for those wanting to begin their Cricut journey. The Joy Xtra is a fun starter cutting machine for many.
