I’ve had my Cricut Explore Air 2 for nearly 5 years. This March will be 5 years. I have mostly made nothing but box cards for all of the holidays and birthdays. I also cut boxes and packaging for my Etsy shop products.

A friend got me hooked on Temu, but I’m only buying stuff for my crafts for the box cards and I also buy some of the galaxy projectors for gifts lol.

I came across these Cricut blades and was curious, because I didn’t realize there was more than 1 blade. I mean, I have the Cricut deep cut blade with the housing and I have the Cricut premium fine tip German carbide blade and the regular Cricut fine tip blade. I normally only use the Circuit premium German carbide blade because I want to make sure all my paper cuts are clean, but sometimes they do have issues.

So the difference between the blades is the angle. The yellow cuts thinner material, but red cuts regular and the blue is similar to the deep cut blade, but without requiring the housing.

I cut 65lb cardstock, but I do occasionally buy 65lb cardstock that seems thinner, and my regular blade destroys that paper sometimes. The edges are awful and sometimes it will have a little bit of cardstock balled up and stuck to the blade which ruins the rest of the sheet. That always happens to the 65lb white cardstock that comes in a pack of 100. The same cardstock that comes on a pack of 25 cuts better for some reason. Same brand, same weight, but for some reason the more you buy in a pack, the thinner the cardstock.

I also use HP matte presentation paper 32lb for printing my graphics because the white 65lb 8.5×11 cardstock doesn’t print very well. Well, I usually have to print on custom and set it on copy paper 32lb, but have to cut it twice. So yesterday I cut it on regular light cardstock+ with the yellow blade and the paper cut beautifully. I did the same with the thinner 65lb paper that comes in a pack of 100.

The red blade would work with the regular 65lb cardstock that comes in packs of 25. Also the 8.5×11 65lb cardstock. But I’ll continue using my German carbide blade, but if I need another blade, I have plenty of the red ones now.

The other materials I cut are the glitter cardstock and chipboard. I cut those on the custom setting and my blades don’t last that long when I cut the chipboard. Sometimes it will ball up the chipboard and ruin the rest of the sheet. I’ve used my deep cut blade for the chipboard, but that doesn’t cut great either. So yesterday I cut the chipboard with the blue blade and it cut beautifully with no issues. So I’ll dedicate the blue to that.

I paid $5.19 for this pack of 40 blades on Temu. It says there are 20 red blades, 10 yellow and 10 blue. This was probably the best purchase for my Cricut ever, because I always want my paper to cut nice and smoothly and not waste anything. It really sucks to make a box card and envelope and see a lot of mistakes in the paper. 1 Cricut fine tip replacement blade is $13 at Michaels, which is more than double what I paid for this pack of 40 blades with 3 different angles.

Of course you want to use Cricut only products, especially when your Cricut is in warranty. Mine is 5 years old, and I haven’t had a warranty for a very long time. But I’m not worried about anything happening because the blades are the same size as the fine tip blade.

This new information is going to make my life so much easier when I cut my projects. I only wish I knew about this a long time ago.