If you want to keep life easy whilst working with adhesive vinyl, we suggest that you have the following tools and accessories on hand. We will explain what each tool is needed for and give you some easy to follow links to check out their prices online.

The Best Tools for Adhesive Vinyl Projects

1. A Vinyl Cutting Machine

Invest in a decent vinyl cutting machine. These machines can cut vinyl with ease, leaving you with professional designs. They are easy to use and honestly worth every single dollar. Find our favorite vinyl die cutter (https://www.thebestvinylcutters.com/best-vinyl-cutting-machine/) on our buyer’s guide.

2. Weeding Tools

Once you have cut your design with your machine, you will need to weed the excess vinyl away.

On our website, we explain what weeding is:

Weeding is a process in which the unnecessary excess vinyl is removed from a design sheet. It can be particularly tricky to remove intricate detailing, especially when working with small designs. Other issues that you might come across include having problems on vinyl lifting from the backing and/or paper tearing in this process. See full post here.

Here is a list of our favorite tools for weeding:

i) The Cricut Tools Basic Set



We love the Cricut Tools Basics as it includes scissors, a scraper, tweezers, spatula and a weeder.

• Tweezers to lift and secure delicate material
• Weeder to remove tiny negative cuts
• Micro-tip scissors with protective blade cover
• Spatula to lift cuts from the mat
• Scraper to burnish material and clean all cutting mats

>>> Click to see pricing for this set on Cricut

ii) Cricut Weeder Tool Set

Another great set of tools for working with vinyl is the Cricut Weeding Tool Set. This kit has all the essential tools for when you do some beautiful intricate weeding work. It has five pieces: fine tweezers, hook tweezers, the classic weeder, piercing tool and hook weeder. These tools allow you to lift, remove, and place the most intricate cuts with speed, ease, and accuracy. The variety of tip styles and angles allows you to work with efficiency.

>>> Click to see pricing for this set on Cricut

iii) Scraping Tool

A scraping tool is pretty much essential and I can guarantee that you will use it every single time you do vinyl projects. A scraper is used to burnish the tape onto the vinyl backing to ensure that the design will get picked up when you peel the tape away. You will also use it to burnish the design onto the surface.

Fortunately, scraping tools are pretty cheap. I love to have a few scraper tools around, that vary in width. The Cricut Tools Basic Set has a small scraper in it which is great for small designs, but I also love to a large-sized scraper around as well.

>>> Click to see pricing for a nice large scraper

3. Transfer Tape

You can’t work with vinyl and not have some good quality transfer tape on hand.

Transfer tape is kinda exactly what it says, it is a tape that allows you transfer your design from the vinyl sheet to the surface that you want to apply it to.

The type of transfer tape that you should buy really depends on the type of vinyl you are using. Transfer tapes come with varying strength of stickiness. You can also find a clear tape that will help you to see where you are applying your design, others have grids on them to help you keep things straight.

You want to find a tape that is strong enough to pick up your design from your vinyl backing, but that is giving enough to release your design once you apply it to a surface.

Here are some popular transfer tape brands:

i) Cricut Transfer Tape

You can choose to purchase either the regular or strong grip tape. You only really need the strong grip for specialty vinyl such as glitter or flock. The tape is 12 x 48″ and has a grid to help you keep things nice and straight.

Here is a quick video to show you how to use the Cricut StrongGrip Transfer Tape with glitter vinyl.



>>> Click to see pricing for the Cricut Tape

ii) Angel Crafts Transfer Tape

We love Angel Crafts Tape as you can get them in different sizes. You can also get them in either clear or white or their premium quality means that you will also have a clean transfer. They also have grids on them to help you keep your designs straight.

The tape comes in a 12 x 8″ size, 3 x 25″ or a 6 x 50″ size. As a tip it is always important to be generous with your transfer tape, make sure you have plenty of excess tape around your design.

>>> Click to see pricing for this brand on Amazon

4. A Light Pad or Table

A light pad is brilliant when you are working on intricate or specialty vinyl designs. The light will help you see the cut lines which will help you pick out all the right bits and pieces as you weed.

We really love the Cricut Bright Pad. The pad is affordable and honesty it just makes weeding easier, which means you can do it quicker. The pad does a brilliant job of illuminating those hard-to-see cut lines.

>>> Click to see pricing for Bright Pad on Cricut

Of course, there are plenty of other handy tools and accessories that you could invest in, but these are the most crucial and the most beneficial in my opinion. And I honestly believe that too many tools are sometimes a bad thing as you can get confused about which tool you should be using it.

I would love to know though: Is there a tool you would recommend that I didn’t mention?