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Cricuts range of simple to use heat presses are the perfect companion to your cutting machine. We've looked at each machine in detail to help you decide which suits your crafting needs.

Cricut is most famous in the crafting world for its fabulous cutting machines but did you also know that they have their own super easy-to-use line of heat presses?

A Cricut Heat Press is the perfect companion machine to the Cricut Joy, Explore 3 or Maker 3 as it means you can take your designs and add them to an even wider range of materials using Iron-on vinyl or Infusible inks!

If you've ever wanted to make matching family t-shirts for a holiday, personalised pyjamas for Christmas or custom mugs as teacher appreciation gifts, a Cricut Heat Press is just the bit of kit to help you get it done.

A heat press is a device that uses pressure and heat to help you permanently transfer a design you cut with your Cricut machine to another material.

Heat presses work a bit like a regular household iron; they have a non-stick surface that heats up to a high temperature that you can use to transfer heat to another surface.

In the case of a household iron, that’s to smooth creases out of clothing using heat and sometimes steam, but with a heat press, you are using the hot surface along with even pressure to transfer or infuse a design into the project you are working on.

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The Cricut EasyPress Mini is the smallest heat press in the range but one of the most versatile. It’s shaped like a normal household iron meaning that it can be used to get into small and hard-to-reach areas of a project (like seams or corners) that the larger presses might not be able to. It’s extremely lightweight and portable, making it the perfect travel-friendly companion to the Cricut Joy.

The Cricut EasyPress 3 is the latest release from Cricut in their line of flat plate heat presses. This upgrade on the EasyPress 2 now has Bluetooth capability so that it can be used with the Cricut Heat App, making it even easier to use. The Cricut EasyPress can be bought in two different sizes, one is square and measures 22.5cm x 22.5cm (9” x 9”), and the other is rectangular and measures 30cm x 25cm (12” x 10”)

The Cricut Mug Press was created as the perfect partner for use with Cricut Infusible Inks. With the Cricut Mug Press, you can add custom infusible ink designs permanently to mugs in just a few minutes and with a perfect finish each time.

The Cricut Hat Press is, as it sounds, a heat press made specifically for pressing designs onto hats. Putting designs on hats has become really popular in recent years, but finding stand-alone hat heat presses (that isn't an add-on attachment to bigger industrial swing arm heat presses) or trying to use a craft iron to apply designs really wasn't easy.

Cricut's Hat Press takes all of the hassle out of pressing different-shaped hats thanks to its curved design and specially designed hat form.

The Cricut AutoPress is an amazing bit of commercial-grade kit designed for the high-volume crafter/craft business owner.

Clamshell heat presses are one of the quickest ways to produce a lot of HTV or sublimation printed work, but they are very industrial looking, clunky and expensive. Luckily Cricut saw that crafters were after a more affordable and practical clamshell heat press and produced the AutoPress as a solution.

If you’re a casual crafter and don’t need to use a heat press day-to-day for your projects or to make products to sell on Etsy, a Cricut EasyPress will be just the thing you need.

But if you’re a full-time craft business owner who uses a heat press to make the majority of your items, the Cricut AutoPress is a must-have bit of kit.

Here are just some of the pros a Cricut AutoPress has over other clamshell or swingarm heat presses;

Safety - The top of the Cricut AutoPress is air-cooled so that it doesn't get hot like the majority of other heat presses do. The burns you can get from the top plates of some other heat presses are no joke, but as always with any Cricut product, safety is a key part of the design.

The AutoPress also has an ‘auto-open’ function, so there is no risk of forgetting about a project that’s being pressed and causing a fire hazard, and the clamshell mechanism also opens up to 62° wide (whereas most other clamshells open to just 45°) which gives you more clearance when moving items in and further minimises the risk of getting burned.

Storage - While the AutoPress is the largest heat press in the Cricut range and does need a decent-sized work area when in use, when it is finished with it can store neatly in a vertical position on its back!

Pressure Adjustment - The Cricut AutoPress can automatically adjust the pressure it uses on materials. Traditional clamshell or swingarm heat presses will often use a crank or height adjustment screw to alter the pressure, which can be difficult to use and get to the perfect setting. When you close down the lid of the AutoPress, the machine will automatically adjust to the pressure you have set.

Four-point Hinge - Usually, a clamshell heat press will close like a book, with the top heated plate touching the back of your project first before it closes fully on the rest of the material. Not only can this cause an issue with uneven pressing, but it can also cause your design pieces to shift around which can ruin a project. Swing arm heat presses don’t have this issue and can come down onto a project completely flat, but they do need a lot of extra space when being used.

Cricut has solved this problem by making the AutoPress a clamshell heat press that presses down like a swing arm heat press with the use of a clever four-point hinge.

Sleek design - Ok, so this isn’t really technical pro, but you really can’t fault the Cricut AutoPress when it comes to design. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the Cricut family product line and is the sort of machine that you can have sitting out on your craft workspace without it looking like it’s some big industrial piece of machinery.

Cricut Heat is the free smartphone app developed by Cricut to be used with the Cricut EasyPress 3. It connects to the EasyPress 3 via Bluetooth and is designed to help make the process of crafting with iron-on vinyl of infusible ink even easier.

Much like how Cricut DesignSpace walks you through the cutting process on the Cricut Joy, Explore and Maker machines once you’ve pressed the ‘Make It’ button, Cricut Heat will give you step-by-step instructions to pre-heat your blank, position your design and press your project.

Yep! If you’re confident in your heat pressing skills, you can use the Easy Press 3 in exactly the same way as you would the previous generations of EasyPress of the EasyPress Mini without the need for the Cricut Heat app. You will, however, need the Heat app to do the initial set-up of the Easy Press 3.

Cricut Heat Presses can be used to make a range of projects from both Iron-On Vinyl and Cricut Infusible Inks

One of the most common uses for heat presses is to adhere heat transfer vinyl (HTV) onto garments or material. Iron-on vinyl doesn’t just have to be used on fabric; as long as you are careful with the heat settings, it can also adhere to wood, metal, paper and cardstock.

Cricut Infusible Ink works in the same way as sublimation does but without needing an expensive printer set-up. Cricut has a range of Infusible Ink sheets that can be cut into your chosen design. That design is then placed face down onto your project and heat-pressed to infuse (or sublimate) that design directly onto the material. They also have a range of Infusible Ink pens, which can be used to draw (freehand or in the Cricut Machines tool adaptor) onto a sheet of paper that can then be pressed onto your project.