In 2020, Cricut launched the Joy machine. At the Launch Party one of the benefits of the Joy that was showcased was the new Cricut Card Mat, which allowed you to place a pre-folded card into the mat and the Cricut would only cut through the top panel of the card.

By the way, this post contains Affiliate Links to companies I have partnered with, such as Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can think of affiliate links like tipping your waitress, only it does not cost you anything extra! Thank you for shopping with my links!

The idea behind this new card mat was that card making was now going to be faster and easier, since you could quickly slip a pre-folded blank card into the Joy machine, cut and decorate the top, and then essentially your card is made. This was also when Cricut started to produce a large number of Cricut Insert Card products, projects and files.

Almost immediately, people who owned a Cricut Explore or Maker machine wanted to know if they would also be able to have a card mat for their machines. There are some crafters, like myself, who looked at the design of the insert cards and figured out ways to create their own designs that used a standard Cricut cutting mat. You can click on the button below to see Shawn’s video on that process.

New Cricut Card Mat Review

If you are a loyal follow of my site, you know that one thing I always strive to give you is open and honest reviews and information about products for your crafting needs. There is a brand new Cricut card mat that was just released a few days ago, and two of the Moderators in my Teach Me Cricut Design Space Facebook group purchased one.

Below are the thoughts and reviews from both of those moderators. Keep reading until the end for the Cricut Card Mat Hack that allows you to get four different card designs on one mat! If you are wondering if you need the new Cricut Card Mat, then this information will help you decide!

I played around with the 2×2 Cricut Card Mat using my Cricut Explore Air 2 and here are my thoughts (NOTE: I really wanted to love this…):

I think the Cricut card mat is too thick for the Explore Air 2 for it to feed in properly.  I made sure to correctly align my cardstock to the left edge and the top of the card slot.  The insert tabs cut off the top of the Cricut card mat and the lower two slots unless I completely jammed the mat into the machine and then it JUST missed cutting off the top by 1/16” YIKES. 

I think this happens due to the double set of rollers on each side of the machine.  The Maker, Maker 3 and the Explore 3 all only have one set of rollers.  The second set on the Explore Air 2 go right on top of the raised portion that makes the card inserts possible and I think it’s just a bit too thick for it to work properly. 

Another thing about the Cricut card mat is that the protective covers go over Card 1 and 3 and then 2 and 4, so side by side.  When your Circuit goes to Make with multiple cards, it will cut in numerical order.  I make this point in that you want to keep your mat clean – this thing isn’t cheap – I think it would make more sense to cover each card space individually or cover 1 and 2 and then 3 and 4.  Maybe it’s just me.  I plan on cutting the panels in half so each card slot is covered individually.

It’s advertised as being able to do four cards at once – great, but wait, if the card you want to make is a Project that goes straight to Make It, you can only do a single or multiple, if you add and apply more copies.  If the card is in a Project that allows you to Customize, you CAN copy and paste it into a new Project with other cards/images.  You can also easily search All Images to find insert and cutaway cards/elements.  First go to All Images, Images Sets and search any of these:  insert, quick, and/or cutaway. 

When I set up my cards, I chose the easiest one for me which is the 4.25×5.5” since it is half of an 8.5×11” piece of cardstock.  I made sure my images were 4×5.25” so that they would fit on their blank – Cricut has this as the R20 card size.  What is really silly is that Cricut gives you the card size in inches AND their card size in their projects, but when you go to Make It, the drop down menu only lists their card size, so unless you memorize their numbering system you could easily get confused – or maybe it’s just me.   

On the note of making it – something glitched and bumped my card base size up to R30, from R20 and I could not get it to change down.  Apparently it thought that one of the images was too big, but I made sure none were.  I had to resize one of the images that was being problematic down to 3.99 across and that fixed the problem.  Yes, I was able to move the images around to where they should be, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a quick card mat? 

Also, according to their website, each panel on the mat is good for up to 20 cuts – that’s up to 80 cards made on a Cricut card mat that costs $17.99. That works out to a little over 22 cents per card.

My takeaway is, wait for the kinks to be worked out – I usually do wait but was excited to see this in my local craft store the other week.  There needs to be some improvements made to make the Cricut card mat work better, at least for now for the Explore Air 2, and more of the insert and cutaway card Projects need to have the Customize option. 

Link to the Cricut Blog post on these mats:  https://cricut.com/blog/make-cards-in-minutes-with-cricut/ 

New 2×2 insert Cricut card mat – First Impressions

Written by JoAnn Davy 5/3/22

I was anxious to try the new Cricut card mat as I had actually purchased it a few days prior to its official release at our local craft store.  As soon as Design Space updated, a couple days ago, to show the new cards and options for the 2×2 Cricut card mat on the “Make It” screen I gave it a try.  

I’ll also mention that I have a Cricut Joy and use it with the card mat quite frequently, so I was familiar with the concept.  But this new Cricut card mat would give me the ability to make 4 cards at a time on the Maker3 instead of one or two at a time.  Note this new 2×2 mat can be used on any of the Maker or Explore series machines.

I initially selected one of the predesigned cards that only had the “Make It” option.

Right on this screen, I was able to indicate the size card I wanted, but I had to do more research to figure out what size a R20 really was. (It’s actually an A2 – 4.25” x 5.5”sized card).

All of the new sizes are listed at the end of this document.

After clicking Make It, I could indicate the number of cards (1 – 4 will fit on one mat, more than that will go onto additional mats).  It assumed I wanted to use the Cricut card mat, but did give me the option to change that if desired.

Some designs appear to only be usable on specific size card bases and you can’t use a square card design on a rectangular card or vice versa.

I then removed the two protective coverings (which are slightly opaque and easier to see than the clear one used on the Joy card mat).  I needed to move the white star wheels to the center and slide my folded card bases into the openings.  Then inserted the mat into the Cricut.  The blue vertical lines on the mat indicate the 10, 20 30 etc. that correspond with the card size selected. 

Note that this mat is thicker and might require you to push it a little harder than usual when it initially feeds into the machine.

These cards were “Cut” only, but had there also been Drawing on them, it would have prompted me to insert the Cricut marker or pen.  It will do all of the drawing then all of the cutting by bouncing back and forth between the two upper cards then move down and do the two lower cards.

When all done I removed the mat from the Cricut.  The very first thing I noticed was that it cut a tiny bit too high on the cards. I thought that I had placed the cards in the exact right spots – as close to the top of the open area as possible, so I’m guessing that the mat didn’t load quite as far into the machine as it should have.  The cards are still usable but the design isn’t exactly centered. 

My second observation was that the Cricut card mat was extremely sticky.  I needed to use a scrapper and tiny spatula to loosen the cardstock then carefully peel off the cards.  I couldn’t see any way to do this without the cards curling.  Historically Cricut has recommended flipping the mat over, bending it slightly and pulling the material down from the mat, but since these mats are quite a bit thicker, I don’t believe this could easily be done. 

After struggling to get the cards off, I was stuck with all the little bits of paper debris on the mat.  I had to use a scrapper to remove it.  It is suggested that you scrape vertically up and down the mat so that you don’t get little bits of debris in the slots that the cards go into.  Just be careful to not scrape so hard that you damage the mat or the adhesive. 

I can see myself having two Cricut card mats.  While trying to remove the cards and cleaning the debris off the first one, it could be cutting the second one.

Here is another image of the card that more clearly shows how much it curled and that the design is off center a little bit.  With the right side insert cuts so close to the edge, I’ll have to be very careful to not rip them when putting in the insert layer.

I then started a new project and typed up the sentiment, used a single line writing style font and set it to draw.  On the Make It screen I indicated that I wanted it four times, and that I was using the Cricut card mat. 

After indicating the size card, it automatically placed the sentiment in the center of each.  However, it assumed I was doing a vertical card with the fold along the left side.  So I had to go into each card and carefully rotate the sentiment. (This is done by clicking on the text then holding down the Shift key while using the mouse to move the circular arrow). 

It would have been easier if the program would have let me adjust the direction of the text on one card, change the quantity and retain the orientation automatically on the other three.

It drew the letters starting that the top bouncing back and forth between the two cards then drew the text on the two lower cards.

While the text was being drawn I found pieces of cardstock and scrapbook paper for the inserts.  These were leftover scraps from other projects so I just used a paper cutter to cut to the correct size.  Generally speaking the insert piece is ¼” smaller vertically and horizontally than the card, so for these 4‑1/4” x 5-1/2” cards the inserts are 4” x 5-1/4”.  If I had wanted to, I could have set up a quick project using the free square image, adjusted to the correct size and cut the inserts using the regular cutting mat.

Here are my four completed cards. 

In this case it doesn’t matter that they are all the same design.  They are being mailed to individuals that don’t know each other and will never know that they got the same basic card as someone else.

So in summary, Yes, I think this new 2×2 Cricut card mat is a nice addition to the Cricut line and will be great if you want to make lots of quick and easy cards – think about the ease of doing birthday party invitations or Christmas cards four at a time. 

But is it perfect? – No.  Hopefully the cutting placement can be resolved so that the insert corners are more centered and I can figure out a way to get the cards off the mat without the curling.  It would also be nice if the initial screen showed you the size of the card in inches and not just R10, R20 etc.

I had been lead to believe that when working with the predesigned cards you had to make all of them the same design.  But I just learned about a “hack” that will let me do four different cards at once and even edit the predesigned cards.  Details for the “Cricut Card Mat Hack” are in the next section of this article.

Footnote:  Card sizes.  My understanding that Cricuts precut card packs (that include card bases, inserts and envelopes) will be available world-wide.  What we think of as a standard A2 (4-1/4” x 5-1/2”) or A9 (5-1/2” x 8-1/2”) sized card in the US is called something different in other countries and some of those countries have other sizes that are considered ‘standard’.  So Cricut came up with these named sizes.  The R stands for rectangular and the S is for Square.

The Cricut Card Mat Hack – Four Different Cards on One Mat

Using the 2×2 Cricut card mat to make 4 different Pre-designed cards at once.

Written by JoAnn Davy 5/5/22

This process can currently only be done the computer version of Design Space, since it requires you to have multiple windows/sessions of Design Space open at once.

You need to do All Insert cards or All Cutaway cards (not a mixture of them) when doing four different cards on the Cricut card mat, because of the different material cut settings.  I’m using insert cards here but the process would be basically the same for Cutaway cards.

This will also let you Save and Modify card projects that were initially Make It only projects.

Let’s start off by opening a New Project.  Then search on Cards – Insert cards.   Wow! I think there are over 2300 of them.

Adding Moon to my search criteria brought up the one that I wanted. I clicked on it.  Selected the size (R20 for a standard A2 –  4.25 x 5.5” card which is a 8.5 x 11” sheet of cardstock cut in half) and clicked on it.

The only option is to click the green Make It.  This will show your card in the upper left position on the Cricut card mat preview.  Then go to the upper left and click on the three lines. These three lines are often called the Hamburger Menu because the three stacked lines look like a hamburger . . . top bun, hamburger and bottom bun.

Next to the word ‘Prepare’.

That will bring up a menu with only a few options available.  Click on Canvas

That will put your card on the design canvas and display it in the Layers panel.  Save your project at this point – just in case something happens.

Now to add another card of a different design.  Go to the very upper left where is shows “File View Help”.  Click on the word File.  Then click on New Window.  This will open up Design Space a second time.  Try to layer the windows so that part of both of them a visible at the same time.

In this new window repeat the process of finding another Insert card and select it.  Make it the same size as the first card.

Again you will click Make It.

Again click on the Hamburger menu in the upper left of the screen.

and then click on word Canvas.

The next step is a feature that was added some time ago – the ability to copy/paste Layers from one project to another.  You will click on the new item to select it. Then right click on your mouse and click on Copy.

Move your mouse into the first Design Space window, where the moon card is. Right mouse click and then click on Paste.

You will now have two different cards on the same design canvas.

Save your project again and close out of the second Design Space window.

Repeat the same process again to grab a third card.  File – New Window, but let’s select a card that has a horizontal fold along the top rather than a vertical fold along the left side.  This one was actually in the Cricut Community and had the Edit option. So just click on it.

But let’s put it on the same canvas as the other two.  You will select the whole image, right click to get the menu and click on Copy.  Move your mouse over to the other window, right mouse click and select Paste.  In order to avoid any possible confusion and to make sure that the fold was in the correct position, rotate the card to 270 degrees. Since this wasn’t a predesigned card, confirm that the height and width of it were the same as the other two cards and note that they were all 4” x 5.25”

Now let’s go one step further with the fourth card.  Again, go to File – New Window and search for a Cactus Insert card. 

Notice that these two are almost identical.  If I selected the rectangular one I could easily just select the R20 size and repeat the above process exactly.  But honestly when I initially looked, I only saw the square card, so that is the one I selected.

Again, I clicked on the Hamburger menu, then on Canvas, Selected the card, right clicked on the mouse and hit Copy. Move over to the first Canvas, right mouse clicked then hit Paste.  But didn’t I say that all of the cards needed to be the same size ??  Yes, so I selected my square card, unlocked the sizing lock and adjusted it to the 4” x 5.25” to match the other three.  It distorted the image a little bit, but not so badly that it was really noticeable. 

Now I’m ready to MAKE my project.  Click the Make it button.  It initially placed my four cards on different mats because each had a different background color, and it defaulted to the standard 12 x 12 mat.

Just go to the first one and change the Material Line Type to “On Card Mat”.  It will place the first card in the upper left position of the Cricut card mat.

Click on the second mat preview, select the item and click on the circle with the three dots in it, click on Move object

And select the Cricut card mat.

It has automatically put this card in the upper right position of the Cricut card mat.

Repeat with the card on Mat 3.  When you try to move it you are apt to see this message. 

That’s because it orientated back to its correct direction.  To fix it, select the item, click on the circle with the circular arrow in it and rotate sideways. Then click on the circle with the three dots and click move  (If you still get an error message about it not fitting on the mat, go back to the design canvas and adjust the size from 5.25” x 4” to 5.24” x 3.992”.

 Do the same with the last card.  As you can now see all four different cards are on the Cricut card mat.

Insert your card bases on the Cricut card mat.  Click Continue. Move all of the white star wheels to the center so they will be over the blue center portion of the Cricut card mat.  Design Space will connect to your Maker or Explore, be sure to select your correct material, it will prompt you to insert a marker for the drawing portion and then cut all four cards.

You could also set up a project to draw your sentiments on the inside. Size the text to fit correctly within the size card you are using.  Fold your cards backward and place in the card mat. Indicate that you are using the Card Mat and the material size to match your cards, if all cards are getting the same sentiment indicate 4 copies.

It will place the sentiment exactly in the middle of each card position.  Since one of our cards had a horizontal orientation, I selected one of the sentiments, and rotated it to correct direction by clicking on the sentiment then on the circle with the circular arrow in it and move it with my mouse.

You can also type four different sentiments and when you indicate the card mat it will automatically place one in each card position.  Just make sure you insert the correct card in each spot so your fronts and sentiments match up.

I also like my sentiments a bit above the center for I selected each and manually moved them up a little bit.

When they are positioned where you want them, hit Continue, insert your mat and marker when prompted.

Once the outside and the sides are complete, you could set up another project to cut your insert pieces at 4 x 5.25, use a paper cutter to cut them manually or use the inserts from the Cricut card packs.

Place your inserts in the slots, sign your cards, stick them in envelopes and you are done.

When the new Cricut Card Mat was launched, many Cricut owners noticed that there were more Insert Cards available in Cricut Design Space. The challenge that many encountered was that there was no button or option easily available to Customize those cards, but only a Make It button. I believe this is because Cricut is trying to encourage people to purchase their supplies of pre-folded cards and card mats.

The steps below will show you how you can cut the predesigned/Make it only cards on a regular mat.

Find the predesigned project you want to start with. In this case it was the 4.5” square Fathers Day card. But I wanted a 4.25×5.5” rectangular card.

Hit Make It then click on the three lines in the upper left and click on the word Canvas.

This brings it into the design canvas (just like any other image).

Save it here. I also duplicated then hid the original (just in case I messed up)

I found the layer with the corner cuts, selected it and used Contour to hide them. (You could also Contour out wording and add text if you desired)

I searched under Images for other corner cuts and resized them to 4×5.25. Placed the Fathers Day image on it, centered it, then Attached all.

From there I cut it out on the Card mat, using a piece of cardstock cut to 8.5×5.5”.

But wait, what if you don’t have the card mat?

Just insert a square, unlock and resize to 8.5 x 5.5.

Insert the score line, make it 5.5” long and center it in the card base.

Move your design onto the right side of cardbase and center vertically (you need 1/4” on each side.)

Attach all of it together and Make the project.

Other Cricut Tips, Tricks and Resources

If you are looking for the best Cricut tips, tricks and resources, including honest feedback and reviews of products like this one, make sure to check out all of Shawn’s resources and sign up for Shawn’s newsletter below.