Taking Advantage of Hidden Layers in Cricut™ Design Space

This week’s Tuesday Tutorial is going to show you how to use the Hidden Layer feature in Cricut Design Space™.  If you are not sure what I am talking about, Hidden Layer is little “eye” in the Layers Panel and, this week, I am going teach you a few tips and tricks for using this feature when creating your projects.

 

♥ Removing Unwanted Layers

You create an beautiful project and realize you are not going to use all the images, but, since paper is precious, you don’t want to waste any resources. You could choose to just delete an image, but you might want to recreate that project at a later date, and finding/resizing those images you deleted can be a chore. This is where the Hidden Layer feature comes in handy.

Here, I have created a project using our Flower Market collection and have decided that I want to recreate the “Bow” with White Burlap Ribbon and replace the Centers with Gold Glitter Gems. Instead of deleting the unwanted images, I am going the Click the “eye” to Hide the images. By doing this, the images still exist in my project, but they will not cut.

 

♥ When Mistakes Happen

How many times have you cut out a project, only to find out that some of the images did not cut correctly?  This happens to me often, especially when I am cutting out mass quantities of kits and a single flower decides to rip. After many stomping fits and corner cries, I discovered that this an opportunity to take advantage of the Hidden Layer feature. Instead of trying to re-cut or recreate the single image, you can “Hide” all the images you don’t need to re-cut.

Let’s pretend that I have cut out my project and neither the Flower outline nor the the Heart on the Vase cut correctly. I can click on the “eye” to Hide the images I am not going to cut out, then, when I “Make It”, only the images I need will appear on the mats.

My other images still exist in my project, they are just “Hidden” temporarily. To bring them back, I just click on the “eye” again to make them Visible.

 

♥ Hidden Font Layers

Many of the Fonts in Design Space™ have a shadow layer that is “hidden”.  When you Filter Fonts to Multi-Layer, you can see the list of all the fonts that have a “shadow” layer. Some of these fonts like to make you think you have lost your mind, and only have the top layer appear when you insert your text. They have a “hidden” layer.

Here we have some Text using the 3 Birds Life’s A Party Font. When I first created the text, only the top layer appeared. If you look at the Layers Panel you will see that that shadow layer is “Hidden”. By clicking the “eye”, I can make the layer appear.

NOTE: If you have a hidden font layer, you will always want to keep the layers “Grouped” so that all the layers size proportionality. 

 

♥ Hiding to Make Life Easier

No, I am not talking about crawling under the blankets to avoid your reality, I am speaking about “Hiding” images to make creating a project in Design Space™ a little simpler.  I especially like to do this when I am playing with fonts.

I am working on a bucket of flowers using our Flower Market collection and I want to add the word “Flora” using a Script font. It would look much nicer welded, but it’s going to be difficult to play with the text when all the layers are behind it. This is where I “Hide” the other images so that I can work with the single image I am manipulating.

Once I have finished moving and welding the letters, I can make the other images “Visible” and resize the font as needed.

There you have it. Four simple ways to take advantage of that little “eyeball” in the Layers Panel.   It may not seem like much, but the Hidden Layers feature can become very useful as you continue to learn how to use Design Space™.  I will be posting a live video showing these steps in my VIP Group – Create with Miss. Carrie’s Creations. Please feel free to join the group and take advantage of some “free” Cricut™ training.

♥I can’t wait to see what you create!