Why won’t my design cut? It says, “cutting,“ and then, “finished,” and nothing happened. This can be very frustrating. I know this; I speak from experience.

The first thing to check is that your cutting lines are actually on. Do this by going to blade on the top right and checking the settings. It should look like this. The next thing to check is that you’re USB cord is connected at both ends. 

After that if it’s still not cutting, chances are you have a problem with off-the-mat objects. You may not even be able to see them. Sometimes they are empty text boxes, but they are still there.

The fact that it says, “cutting,” even when it doesn’t means that your connection it good. Now it’s time to really examine that design of yours and determine where all the elements are.

To do this use CTL-A or CMD-A (Mac) to select the entire design. If your bounding box looks anything like this, you have items off the page that are either grouped of part of a compound path.Simply ungroup them or release the compound path and you should be good to go.