Using Slice in Cricut Design Space

Last updated on February 6th, 2018 at 10:10 am

Not sure how (or even why you might want to!) to use Slice in Cricut Design Space? Here’s everything you need to know about the slice tool, as well as sample images to show the results of different ways of slicing objects and shapes. 

Welcome back to my series on the five tools in the layers panel of Cricut Design Space: Weld, Attach, Slice, Flatten, and Contour.

Today we’re slicing and dicing! Using Slice in Cricut Design Space is probably one of the more aggravating tools in the program. Not because it’s difficult to use, but because there are some quirks that can frustrate newer users.

The main purpose of Slice is to cut overlapping layers into their own shapes. First quirk: you can only slice two shapes at one time, so if you have more than two things selected the Slice tool in the lower right corner will be grayed out. If you find this grayed out, you may have an object grouped — use the Ungroup tool at the top of the layers panel to ungroup.

Let’s take a look at a few ways to use Slice.

• Cutting out a shape from a larger shape
• Creating interesting shapes not found in the basic shapes toolbar
• Trimming off unwanted parts of shapes

Cutting a shape out of a larger shape using slice

I went into Cricut Access and selected this tag shape and cute saying. I want to cut the saying out of the tag shape. Select both and click Slice.

Second quirk! Instead of just slicing the front shape out of the back shape, it actually creates three shapes. Your original top shape (in this case, the saying), the cut out tag, and the leftover from the cutout tag.

This is probably more things that you expected to end up with, but you can easily delete the extra pieces and keep the cutout tag.

Creating Shapes with the Slice Tool

One thing I like using the Slice tool for is creating shapes that are not available in the left-hand Shapes menu. This is similar to how we made the snowman using the Weld tool.

Let’s make a crescent moon shape. Using the Shapes toolbar, insert two circles and make one big one and one slight smaller one. Then overlap them — you can see that crescent taking shape on the left.

Then select both circles and click “Slice.” You’ll end up with this:

That, my friends, is even more shapes than the first example! Four shapes. The crescent I wanted to make, plus two middle pieces and the leftover on the right. Delete those extra pieces and keep your crescent. Easy, but definitely a bit confusing if you’re new to the Slice tool!

Trimming Shapes using Slice

Sometimes you will want to cut off a certain part of a shape. For instance, maybe I don’t want the tails on this arrow.

I can use the Slice to to, well, slice off the end of the arrow. Create a square from the Shapes menu on the left, and resize to cover the entire end of the arrow.

Ungroup the two pieces of the arrow (because remember, you can only select two shapes at a time to slice). Then select the rectangle and the arrow and click Slice. Like with the other examples here, you’ll end up with a bunch of unneeded shapes, which you can delete. But you also end up with the straight end on the arrow!

Hope you found these three examples of using the Slice too helpful! Come back next week — I’m going to be talking all about Flatten!

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