Cricut Score & Perforation Lines: SVG Creation Guide

Created on:

March 21, 2023

Updated on:

February 8, 2024

Written by Kelsey Sergi

If you been wondering how to add score lines or perforation lines to your Cricut SVGdesigns in Inkscape this tutorial will walk you throught step-by-step.

I have been creating SVG's for just around three years, and I love doing it for free. If you are on your SVG journey, adding score lines or perforation lines is a great technique for 3-D projects and card making. You can download inkscape for free here! Please check out my inkscape basics blog and inkscape 101 Youtube Playlist if you're just starting your SVG creation journey.

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How to Add Score Lines

I wish there was a way to add score lines to your project and when you upload it over to Cricut Design Space it automatically knew it was the score line however that is not going to be the case.

After you get your shape created, you're going to grab your Bézier tool and draw your score line. It can be any shape that you'd like usually score lines are straight so I create a straight score line but you truly can draw any shape you want and make it into a score line.

Now I wish they were more to this, but for a score line you're just going to keep it as a stroke, so once you draw that Bézier line that is literally your score line. Go ahead and save your file, and then upload it over into Cricut Design Space.

Once you are in Cricut Design Space, you will grab that line you'll see over in your layers and you're gonna go to the drop-down box and change it to a score line. Unfortunately there is no way to tell the program that you want this to be a score line when you upload it or when you save it.

When do you have a change into a score line, make sure you attach it back to the piece that you wanted to score and you can send it to your machine. And that's it you've added a score line onto your SVG file.

How to Add Perforation Lines

Now, you might be wondering why would you rather use perforation lines and honestly I wish I would've taught myself this earlier and put perforation lines into almost every 3-D design that I have. Perforation lines are great because you only need your basic blade, you don't need a scoring tool you don't need the perforation wheel, you don't need any sort of other tool for your Cricut to create perforation lines with this technique.

So we've already created that score line with a stroke and we're going to work off of this exact same line. The first thing you're going to do is go to object and then fill and stroke and this is going to bring up a side panel.

From here you're going to go to stroke style and while you have the stroke highlighted and clicked on you're gonna want to go down to dashes and drop down to a dash that you like I prefer the one that's about three little dashes.

Now before we did not change our score line into a path, but we need to change this one into a path. So you were going to keep your stroke highlighted now that it has the dashes and you're going to go up to path and then stroke to path and this is going to change it so that it has nodes.

You'll see that these dashes of four points they're like tiny little rectangles and we don't want that, so we need to make the width smaller. My score line is vertical so I'm changing the width if it's horizontal you would change the height. I'm going to change my width to .0001 in inches and that is going to make it basically invisible but I promise you that the line is still there.

So now let's save this file again, and head over to Cricut design space and when you upload this file and you probably won't even see this line at first until you have it on your canvas.

Once you have it on the canvas you'll see the perforation lines just make sure to attach them since we didn't difference them over in inkscape. And now you've added perforation lines to your file. This is a great option for 3-D files and it makes it so that anybody can use them without having to have a scoring tool.

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Kelsey Sergi - the owner and crafter at Dinosaur Mama.

Hi crafters! I'm Kelsey and I am here to bring you new original craft projects and free SVG files for your cutting machines every week!

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