Before purchasing my machine, I read several Cricut Maker Reviews  and I found each of them extremely helpful. In this review I will cover a few things that- even after reading those reviews -surprised me.

My Silhouette Cameo was purchased about 5 years ago. I live in New Zealand and there are no retail supplier of Sillouette products here. I bought my Silhouette Cameo in Australia when we were on a family holiday. We went on a massive road trip up the Sunshine Coast to buy it from a little crafting wherhouse way in the back of beyond.

I have loved my Silluoette Cameo and it has served me very well. When I asked my family if I used the machine a lot they said ‘you use it a lot sometimes” and that would about sum it up. When we are prepping for a party it gets a real work out. I’ve always thought the branding and company experience of Sillouette was excellent. The products are top quality. But the experience hasn’t been perfect. I’ve found the Cameo a bit temperamental at times. I found that getting the blade depth and clean cut right sometimes takes me a fair bit of trial and error.

I was also excited about the possibilities of using the cutting machine for fabric but found doing this on the Cameo was fiddly. The range of materials the machine cuts are a bit limited. Then there was the lack of a local supplier. Everything had to be ordered online and took ages to get to me. All you crafters out there will understand the frustration of having to wait to finish you project.

The last couple of times I’ve used my Cameo it’s been clear it’s starting to show it’s age. There have been some technical glitches which are making it a bit unreliable. So I started to look for a new machine. Spotlight, our local crafting chain, had always been a Cricut supplier. I’d bought my first Cuttlebug from there years before. Cricut’s cartage system and lack of ability to use your own designs at the time had taken it out of the running when I bought my Cameo. Their offerings, I’m pleased to say, have come a long way.

I was looking a the Cricut Explorer when luckily the Maker showed up in the store. It was love at first site. The promise of the range of material that it could cut opened up endless creative possibilities. As soon as the Maker came on sale, I snapped one up. Now here we are- one week later and I’m ready to give you the low down with my Cricut Maker Review.

First impressions of the Cricut Maker

I decided to do a live unboxing video on our Facebook page as hard as it was not to just open it up as soon as I got it. What the Cricut Maker came with in its box wasn’t very clear to me, so here’s what it comes with:

• Cricut Maker Machine
• Power cord
• USB cable
• Rotary Blade for fabric
• Fine Cut Blade for paper and card
• 0.4 Black pen
• Light grip mat
• Fabric grip mat
• Pack of sample materials for your first project

It’s a decent amount of gear to get started with.

Cricut Maker Set-up

I’m one of these jump in and start playing people, rather than a reading the instructions first one, so I initially missed the instructions on the first page of the Welcome Book with the url to set up your Cricut Maker. I was a little stumped at first until I found that. Once I visited the link the set up process was really easy. You have to set up a Cricut Design Space account if you don’t already have one.

One of the cons that I’ve heard about the Cricut Universe is that the only choice is between Software and a Service (SaaS). I’m currently on a 2 week trial and I’m not yet sure what will happen when that expires. I’ll keep you posted. Personally, I find that I’m being bled dry financially by subscriptions. For me, I’m not likely to be using much of the massive library of designs that come with the subscription, as I primarily design my own. This is where, personally, I prefer Silhouette’s model of paying once to own the software.

The software guides you through the set-up as well as your first project. Again, here I didn’t read the instructions properly and used my own materials. The materials supplied had already been put into the settings so it didn’t work as well. The project made a lot more sense once I realised that. I found that I had to run though the project a couple of times, but again this was just me not reading the instructions. Sensing a pattern anyone?

The sample project came out really well. It’s designed to try out the three tools that come with the Cricut Maker. The pen, the rotary fabric blade and the detail blade. The sample project gives you a good run through of each of them. All worked perfectly.

Design Space has a massive number of pre-made projects and I like the tile design of the interface. Each project tile comes with a picture and detailed instructions on what you’ll need which is helpful before starting something. But what I was keen to try was importing my own design into Design Space and see how it handled that. That’s where things got a little interesting.

Cricut Design Space

I’ve been a graphic designer most of my life and worked with design software for decades. I’m afraid to say, I didn’t find Design Space super intuitive. The tools are all fairly straightforward, but I think it’s clearly been designed to make the pre-made designs ahead of designing your own. I tried first importing a simple SVG.

The file imported fine but when I hit the make button the whole design had been rearranged to maximise the material usage which had blown my design apart. That’s great if you’re doing card making or scrapbooking and intend to stick each of those little pieces on by hand. Unfortunately my design was a quote, which I wanted cut exactly as I’d laid it out. I went back to Adobe Illustrator and used the Unite feature in the Pathfinder panel to weld all the pieces that touched together. Then re-imported. That helped a bit. At least the words stayed together!

Finally I resorted to Lorrie Nunemaker’s youTube tutorial to explain to me how to get my design to stay together as a whole. This part of the programme had really stumped me. Not intuitive at all! After watching the video, I found out that for designs to stay together and cut together, they have to be attached. At the bottom right of the Design Space interface is a row of tools that are extremely important to understand for you to get the results you want.

The tools are:

• Slice
• Weld
• Attach
• Flatten
• Contour

I’m still learning how to use these tools but I’ll show you my understanding of them briefly.

Slice: Breaks overlapping objects up into separate parts that will cut sepearatley.

Weld: Creates one object out of overlapping objects.

Attach: Forces objects to cut as a they are laid out on the screen.

Flatten: This is for ‘print and cut’ this will insure that only the outside outline cuts and everything else will print.

Contour: For defining exactly which pieces inside a grouped object cut and don’t.

Cricut Maker Review Summary

It’s only one week in and I’m really excited about the creative possibilities that my new Cricut Maker will open up. I’ve been watching tutorials on metal engraving and embossing which have me super excited to try. I haven’t had time yet to try everything I would like to but I’m definitely pleased and impressed with the quality and ease of cutting. The process of sending the job to the cutter seems a little simpler than the Silhouette and more often successful using the default settings.

The biggest challenge I’ve had is with the software, and perhaps that’s partly because I’m used to Silhouette Studio. I do like how by default the objects stay in place in Studio and that you can define which shapes cut and score in the layers panel, which was similar to my experience in Adobe Illustrator. However, setting these in the Design Space layers didn’t seem to stick when it came to cutting if the correct action, e.g. attach, hadn’t been applied first. I’ve also found the software a little buggy, hanging on occasion.

I think I’ll also find the font restrictions annoying. When I import my own SVGs is Design Space I’m issued a warning that the text is an unsupported element and dumps it. Even if Design Space had a text field there as a place holder, it would be helpful. Not that helpful when I’m trying to sell a design where the text is a key part of the product, but I guess I’m still trying to work my way around that one! Ultimately though, I’m confident that with a bit more time learning how Design Space works, we’ll be crafting up a storm together.

For SVG cutting files from Printable Party Ideas visit our Easy Store.

I recently created a logo for a client which lead me to learn a lot about foiling. Now if you’re not familiar with the term I’m referring to spot covering certain aspects of a design with a thin metal coating not foiling your opponent in cheese or a duel or anything quite as dramatic as that.

This has been a technique around in the printing industry for a very long time. Foiling always lends a richness to any design and is associated with quality. Just take a look at your perfume and makeup packages. A lot will use gold foil.

Though it’s a technique that has been around for yonks it’s certainly having a bit of a revival. We are decorating my 10 year olds bedroom at the moment and home deco shops are full with wall art with foiled typography and other accents of the metallic type. It looks cool and the good news is you can do it at home.

Up until recently if you wanted to use this effect you had to go through a professional printer and use an expensive process which involved getting a foil block (like a metal stamp of your design) made then getting the design heat stamped onto your paper. However with the advent of digital foiling there are now cheaper and even DIY options.

There are a couple of ways to achieve the look. I’ll give a brief description of each before going on to demonstrate step by step the method I used.

Foiling using reactive foil and a heat transfer machine.

For this process you’ll need…

• a specialised machine such as the Heidi Swapp Minc machine or it can be done with a laminator.
• some sheets of reactive foil
• your design printed on a laser jet printer NOT ink jet. The toner in the laser jet is what the foil sticks to.

Jennifer McGuire has created an excellent tutorial on the process on YouTube:

Introduction to Heidi Swapp Minc Machines

Foiling using sticky embossing powder

If you’re a stamper you might find this process fun. Using sticky embossing power you can turn any of your stamps into a foiling block!

Tim Holtz Ranger Demo – Sticky Embossing Powder with Foils – CHA 2015

Foiling with a die cutting machine, double sided adhesive and reactive foils

Somewhere along my internet travels I came across this technique. Firstly, I didn’t know double sided adhesive paper existed until a few weeks ago but now I do what a brilliant product. I chose this technique because I have a die cutter and I don’t have a laminator or a Minc machine or for that matter a laser printer.

This technique works well for reasonably chunky designs i.e. largish type. I wouldn’t try it for anything too intricate – that really is where the Minc comes into it’s own.

Materials

• Silhouette Cameo or personal die cutter
• Double sided adhesive paper (I found the Silhouette brand worked best)
• Watercolour paper
• Inks or watercolours for colouring your background
• Reactive foil sheets

1. Create your canvas. I have had this set of Dr Martins watercolour inks since design school. I’ve always loved the vivid colours and the way they blend and merge. I had so much fun creating my background. Of course you can use digital backgrounds for this. There are loads of Photoshop brushes and watercolour background files available if you don’t want to get messy or don’t have these materials on hand but doing it your self is a lot of fun and you can customise the colour to exactly the one you want. I started by wetting my paper with a sponge so that when I applied the inks the paper was ready to soak them in. I also had a water spritzer bottle on hand to spray the ink to get spotty and blend water reactive effects. I choose the ink colours I liked and used sweeping strokes and splats and splotches to apply. Really anything goes here; you just want it to look free and not too over-worked or contrived.
2. Using your die cutting machine and your double sided adhesive cut out your design. I used the default setting with the Silhouette brand adhesive paper which worked well. Using some kind of precision tool (mine is always my scalpel). Pick out the backing and adhesive insides of the letters e.g. the inner bit of the p; basically anything you don’t want the foil to stick to. This is a bit of a time consuming task and again here’s where a Minc would be a lot easier. With a bit of patience though, you’ll get there. A good idea to practice on something small first.
3. Once your watercolour background is dry you can start transferring your adhesive letters or design to the background. Do it word at a time if you can and if possible leave the top most paper covering on the adhesive and peel that and the double sided adhesive together off the back most cover paper (the one stuck to the cutting mat). Leaving the top paper on will keep your double sided adhesive clean and maximise it’s stickiness. Use the negative space of the design to check you’re positioning your text correctly by laying it over top of the design as you go.
4. Now the fun part of adding the foil. If you had any parts of the design where the top cover paper came off in the process, do them first. With your reactive foil shiny pretty side up lay it over your adhesive letters or design. Press firmly and rub with the ball of your fist a few times to make sure the foil has stuck and then gently peel away. 
5. Work away uncovering word by word and applying foil as you go. 

This quote was chosen by my daughter. It’s part of a larger statement but one that I’ve always loved. We’ve included the .svg file free here for you to download and try yourself.

Free download svg file Have fun and happy foiling!

A couple of cautionary notes. Minc foils come with a health warning. I contacted American Crafts and they assured me they are safe to use around children but as you can see in my photos just to be on the safe side I wore gloves while handling the foil and I would always wash my hands thoroughly after using them. Also I wouldn’t recommend using them on anything that is likely to get into the hands of small children who are liable to put thing in their mouths.

Also though I’m no intellectual property expert as far as I have found out quotes published before 1926 are in the public domain so are useable in this kind of situation.

So a year ago I wrote a post about how to save money on groceries. I thought it would be a good idea to report back on our progress.

In 2014 about 20% of our income was spent on food, both on the weekly groceries plus takeaway meals, coffee’s out, trips to the bakery in the weekend etc. In 2015 we managed to reduce that to 16%. While our aim was to reduce our spending by more than this it’s still resulted in a significant saving. We have managed to save money enough for a modest family holiday or several pieces of furniture or chunk off the mortgage for a couple of examples. Enough to make a difference. At times it was definitely touch and there were budget blow out months. December for instance was atrocious. We hosted Christmas dinner plus had a house guest for a couple of week and all that contributed to a big budget overspend.

2015 has been a big year for us. We have moved from our first home that we’d been in for 15 years to a much larger home with a bigger mortgage. This budget experiment has shown us that if we buckle down there is money to be saved which can give you some added confidence when making big purchases.

So what have we learnt.

• Our biggest savings came from avoiding take away meals. I learnt to plan ahead if I knew I had a busy week with a lot of after school activities that would make cooking a meal difficult I had to have some quick meals up my sleeve.
• While most weeks we found we could pretty much keep to our grocery budget occasionally you have to replace a big ticket item like olive oil and this just throws everything out. While I kept our weekly goal low I knew the actual realistic budget after awhile needed to be a little higher than my initial figure. But keeping aiming for the lower figure helped balance the overspend weeks. Just little mind tricks like that can help.
• My husband has become a bit of a star and huge advocate of the healthy and home made direction the budget has sent us in. His home made muesli has become legendary. My eldest daughter has also stepped up a and her baking is awesome.
• My daughter also had a healthy lunch box compliment paid to here by her teacher at school.

So this is a bit of a departure from our usually party themed posts but great food is part of what we love here at Printable Party Ideas so I thought I’d share some tips I have discovered really work to help you save money on groceries. I think we are pretty typical in that when we sit down to balance the budget we wonder where all the money goes each month. We’re not extravagant dresses, we don’t smoke, we make do with one car and we bought our house a long time ago so our mortgage payments are quite low. So where then does all the money go? Short answer is we eat it! I’ve been tracking our spending quite closely now for about a year and about 20% or our outgoings are on food, and while we all know you can’t do without food, what food we buy and how much we spend on it is somewhat discretionary. I don’t want to come off sounding all Marie Antoinette because I know a lot of people manage on much tighter budgets than we do and you may be already doing all you can but read on and see if any of these suggestions will work for you.

• Set a baseline. The first step in saving money is knowing where it’s going. I recommend before trying to put any savings in place you just spend normally for a couple of months but take a careful look at where it’s going. Using a budget tracking tool for this can really help. Our bank has a great one online. One of the great things about it is everything goes through the bank account so there’s no additional work having to add transactions in and no way of missing anything. This tool even tells you your average spending in any category then when you set your new budget it will tell how how much that will save you in a year. This can be really motivating, especially if the amount is significant enough. It has to be easy or you just won’t do it. So check out if your bank has a facility like this and if it does definitely take advantage of it.

• Set a realistic goal and stick to it. Too low and you’ll be miserable and it won’t last so make sure you go for sustainable long term savings that allow you to still have the odd treat. This usually means by the end of your week you have to get a little creative. The key is to make it kind of like a game rather than a hardship. What can I make for dinner out of what’s in the pantry and the freezer? It can result in some rather interesting dinners but it can also be a fun creative challange.

• Grocery shop online if you can. If you have a supermarket chain in your area that does online shopping – use it! I’ve been doing my grocery shopping online for about 10 years now and it’s by far the easiest way to stick to a budget. Plan your meals according to what’s on special and buy brands that are discounted. You’ll be amazed how that adds up. I saved $50 on my last grocery bill by doing just that. Check your cupboards as you shop so you don’t have any reason to do midweek top up shops. If you do forget something and have to go do a mini shop during the week, stick strictly to a list and make sure the cost of your mini shop is deducted off the next shop so you don’t blow your budget.

• Buy ingredients, not meals or ready made as much as possible. Stock your pantry, fridge and freezer with basics so your never caught out

• Bake! Bake cookies for lunch boxes. Bake bread. Bake, Bake, Bake. It takes effort for sure but it’s cheaper and yummier than anything pre-made and you know exactly what your putting into your families bodies.

• Plan ahead. You’ll probably have to spend an hour or two each weekend baking for the week ahead. If you have left overs freeze them to save yourself time in the future. We all have busy lives these days so make sure you plan easy quick meals for the nights that your home late so you don’t have the excuse of heading to the take out.

• Cut down on meat and don’t skimp on the fruit and veg. Meat is often the most expensive part of the food bill. Try adding a couple of vegetarian options each week or making meals where the main focus isn’t the meat such as stir fries. Also bacon and salami are your friends here because they pack a big flavour punch for a small quantity.

So we’re about half way into our second month of our new budget. Still early days yet, but so far so good. We’ve survived the back to school test. We’re making our own lucnhes and what’s great is we all agree we are eating much more healthily than before. No one is resenting it – at least not yet and we have more money in the bank account.

Need a little help editing our files? What the quick demo video below for easy step by step instructions.