iTWire has long been a fan of Cricut; in essence, the Cricut ecosystem is a range of cutting machines, heat presses, tools, and materials. Whether you want to make cool chipboard and vinyl elephant coat hangers, wooden block toys, vinyl decals for your furniture, stencils, wall lights, clip-together wooden and card decorations and ornaments, colourful mesh bags for keeping your home organised, or much much more, Cricut has all you need to make it come to life.

At its most simple, the steps are design your idea in the free Cricut Design Space app, cut your materials on the Cricut cutting machine in much the same way you'd print to a printer, then affix your design to shirts, hats, mugs, bags, or whatever else using a Cricut heat press.

You may well have seen Cricut bundles in stores, such as the newly released Cricut Maker 4, but might not know there's a big brother in the form of the Cricut Venture. And, you may have seen the Cricut EasyPress 3 heat press but not the Cricut EasyPress Mini. Together, they make the largest and smallest of Cricut's cutters and presses and are excellent additions to your creative repertoire.

Starting small, the Circut EasyPress Mini is a delightfully easy to use handheld press. It is the perfect heat press for your smaller designs such as shoes or teddy bears. It features three distinct heat settings, easily presses into tight spaces and allows you to curve with contours and squeeze into seams. It has built-in safety smarts like heat-safe plastics, auto off, and an insulated safety base. The Cricut EasyPress Mini is available at a retail price of $129 from Spotlight, Harvey Norman, Big W, and Officeworks. It's available in Raspberry and Zen Blue colourways.

iTWire has been using the EasyPress Mini ourselves, loving the new Zen Blue colour, and finding this heat press small but mighty. Its diminutive size hides the big punch it carries when it comes to effortless pressing, combined with the CricutCricut Heat Guide to help determine the ideal heat settings for your project in only three clicks.

In particular, one project we've been playing with is based on a candy cane Christmas font, by the Cricut designer Mimi. Let's step back a bit. Yes, you can make anything you imagine with Cricut. In fact, the only limit is what you can imagine. And sometimes what you imagine sometimes needs a little inspiration.

iTWire has shown how we've used Cricut to make matching M&M themed T-shirts, Koala-themed pre-school T-shirts, new baby brother caps, customised bags, Father's Day mugs, horse float decals, heat-sensitive designs, and more. Largely we've always used a single layer because, in fact, it didn't even occur to use multiple layers until seeing Mimi's candy canes. These are so clever and effective in their simplicity, especially using a red background. The "trick" behind the candy cane is that one layer contains the outline, another the alternating black sections, with the underlying colour of whatever material you choose shining through as the other section. Here's our work, all ready to press with the Cricut Heat Press Mini Zen Blue.

Here's the most important thing to know about Cricut: the limit truly is only your imagination.

What if you have a big imagination then? Here comes the Cricut Venture.

This large-scale cutting machine is the biggest in the Cricut range and comes with an optional stand. It's able to cut up to 22.8 metres of repeated images. It is also the company’s fastest machine with a cutting speed of up to 63.5 centimetres per second, allowing users to get more done in less time. It has a retail price of $1,499 (stand sold separately) and is designed to be beautiful and functional at the same time. The unique 45-degree angle for this cutting machine allows it to keep a small footprint with large impact. It’s designed to sit at the edge of a table so when cutting on a mat, you don’t need to have 91 cm behind and 91 cm in front of the machine to operate. Cricut Venture is packed with functionality and is able to cut most popular materials in addition to drawing, scoring, foiling. It supports Print then Cut capability up to 24 in x 28" (61cm x 71 cm). With a force of up to 400 gf, it allows for cutting and making projects with more than 100 different types of materials to make things like large 3D paper projects, extra-large vinyl wall decals, huge paper flowers, and making bulk quantities of sweatshirts or other clothing items. It has handy spaces to store all your tools. You can tell a lot of thought has gone into it to make it practically useful while minimising space requirements to only what's essential.

"Our platform is designed to inspire and empower our community of makers to customise their everyday. Our community has ambitions to grow — whether it be their love for making, a side hustle, or full-time business — and are looking for ways to achieve and scale their ideas," said Cricut ANZ regional director Nicola Dow Smith.

"We created Cricut Venture for enthusiastic makers and those who sell what they make, or want to have creative control over their merchandise, without size limitations. With Cricut Venture and the full Cricut platform, our community members can bring their large-format dreams to life with precision and ease."

Whether you're an existing Cricut enthusiast, or an enthusiast-in-waiting (because, after all, there's no such thing as somebody who uses a Cricut and doesn't become enthusiastic) there are devices and materials for you, and for whatever project you can think up.

Keep your eyes open for inspiration. iTWire had the good fortune to attend a Cricut-themed Christmas party and every decoration was created using Cricut products, apart from the glamourous Mrs iTWire's dress.

And whether you go big - with the Cricut Venture - or small - with the Cricut EasyPress Mini - or in between with the Cricut Maker 4, Cricut Joy Xtra, Cricut EasyPress, Cricut HatPress, Cricut MugPress or others - there's a Cricut device perfect for your arts, crafts, ideas, creations, and aspirations.

Yes ... to paraphrase a famous song:

all things bright and beautiful,
all Cricut's great and small
all things fine and wonderful
Cricut helps make them all.