Easy Greetings Cards with Score Lines in Cricut Design Space

Learn how to make your own card blanks for greetings cards in Cricut Design Space and how to add score lines to existing card designs to make them easier to fold.

This tutorial is in two sections. The first section is how to design your own card templates in Cricut Design Space and the second part is how you can add score lines to existing greetings card SVGs if they don’t come with one as part of the design.

How to make a card blank in Cricut Design Space

Here’s how to make a simple 5×7 inch card blank in Design Space.

You can use the same steps to make any sized card, or even different shaped cards.

Step 1: Create the card base

First, open up Design Space and start a new project.

Go into “Shapes” and choose a square.

Click the padlock icon above the width/height boxes to “open” it up. This then allows us to manually type in the width and height boxes to make the card in the correct size.

The width should be double the width of the card you want to make, and the height should match the card. So to make a 5×7 inch card, enter 10 inches as the width and 7 inches as the height.

I usually cut my card bases from white card so I’ve changed the colour to white.

Go into “Shapes” again and add a Score Line.

Resize it to the same height as the card (so in this case, 7 inches).

Press “Select All” to select the rectangle and score line

Press “Align” and then “Center”.

This puts the score line exactly in the middle of the base card.

It might look like that’s all we need to do, however if we were to click “Make It” now, you’ll see that the Cricut is trying to do the score line on a random piece of card and not where we need it to score.

To fix this, press “Select All” again to make sure both layers are selected, then click the “Attach” button on the bottom-right of the screen.

The layers panel will update to show that the layers are now Attached.

Now when “Make It” is selected, the score line is showing in the correct place:

Step 2: Add mats and layers

I like to do some matting and layering on the front of my cards to build depth and to help draw the eye’s attention to the focal point of my card.

To do this, go into “Shapes” and choose a square.

Make sure the padlock icon above the width/height boxes is open and then type numbers into the width and height boxes that are half an inch smaller than your card front on each size.

For a 5×7 inch card, that would be 4.5 inches wide and 6.5 inches tall.

Make the rectangle a bright colour and position it in the middle of the front of the card.

Click the rectangle and then press “Duplicate” to make a copy.

Change it to a different colour to the layer below and resize it so it’s half an inch smaller on each side.

For our card, that’s 4 inches wide and 6 inches tall.

That’s it! Your simple mats and layers are now done and ready to cut.

You could experiment by cutting more intricate shapes instead of rectangles, but that, in a nutshell, is how to make card fronts and card blanks in Cricut Design Space.

How to add score lines to existing card SVGs

Let’s move on to part two which is adding score lines to existing greetings card SVGs that don’t automatically come with one.

Here’s a layered greetings card which is one of the designs from my SVG shop:

The SVG file is available to purchase here.

The base card layer in this design doesn’t have a score line on it. In fact, I don’t design my cards with score lines because you can’t tell Design Space that you’d like lines to be scored when you’re uploading a SVG, so they would load in as cut lines.

I don’t want you to accidentally cut random lines on your projects without realizing that you had to change certain layers to “score”, so to avoid that happening I leave the lines off completely.

However, I know it can be easier to have score lines on those base cards and in fact when I’m cutting them, I always add one manually in Design Space, so I thought it would be helpful to write a tutorial on how to do that.

Step 1: Separate the card base layer

Click on the design on the screen and then press “Ungroup” to separate out all the layers.

Scroll down to the bottom of the layers panel to find the base card and click the little “eye” icon next to it to hide it from the screen.

Press “Select All” to select the rest of the card.

Click the “Group” button to group those layers back together again.

Click the eye icon next to the group title to hide all those layers in just one click. You can close up the layers in the group to make it easier to see the next steps by clicking the little arrow next to the group name.

Turn the card base layer back on by clicking the eye next to that layer.

Step 2: Add the score line

Now we can add a score line to the middle of the base card in exactly the same way as we did for Part 1 of this tutorial.

Go into “Shapes” and add a Score Line. Resize it to the same height as the card (so in this case, 7 inches).

Press “Select All” to select the base card and score line.

Press “Align” and then “Center”.

This puts the score line exactly in the middle of the base card.

We need to tell the Cricut to do the score line in this position, so select the base card and score lines layers and press “Attach”.

It should now be looking like this:

Step 3) Put the card layers back together

Turn the rest of the layers back on by clicking the eye next to the group heading.

They will probably be showing underneath the card blank now.

Click-and-drag the layer group to above the card blank so you can see them.

You’ll probably find that the main card layers don’t line up with the base card any more.

To line it all back up, press “Select All” and then “Align” > “Align Top” and then “Align” > “Align Right”.

That should put it back into position like this:

We can’t see the score line any more as the front of the card is covering it, but it is still there 🙂

Finally, press “Group” again with all layers selected so that the card base and other layers become grouped.

The layers panel should look something like this, although it may be a bit different depending on the card design which you are using:

Now the card is ready to be resized if you want to change the size of it, or you can go straight ahead and cut it out by clicking “Make It” and following the on-screen instructions.

Here is what the card looks like when finished:

I hope this video on how to add score lines in Design Space was helpful.

I’ll be adding more “short and snappy” Design Space tutorials soon, so don’t forget to bookmark the main Design Space tutorials page so you can easily find the latest posts.

Happy crafting,
Sarah