Bit later than expected

I have playing with my new toy over the past few days and whilst it is very straight forward to use there are one or two little things I needed to get my head round and use correctly.   Blade depth was one of them, naturally I'd watched just about every video made on the Brother Scan N Cut machine and thought I knew it all.  Umph.    My first, absolutely stupid mistake was leaving the backing paper on the adhesive backing when I started to cut out fabric shapes.  What do paper and glue do?    Yep I ruined my fabric carrier sheet because the paper backing on the Heat n Bond stuck to the glue... duh.   A bit of common sense would have told me that but no, I did what I normally do when cutting shapes on die machines, left it on.  I tried to get the paper off the glued side of the carrier sheet but to no avail and it had to go in the bin.  By the time I'd messed around with it it was in no state to lay flat.

That was mistake number one and one I will never, never, never do again.  It cut the fish shapes beautifully, no bits of fibres left clinging to the shape. The material I used was a metallic cotton which can be difficult to cut as it frays easily.

Mistake number two, and I only made two but they turned out to be expensive ones, was to forget to adjust the cutting depth of my blade when I swapped from thick card to craft vilene.  I now have two door shaped holes in my cutting mat.  Luckily you can just pop the pieces back together and tape them up with duct tape.  It works without any problems in the machine.

I love the machine but am disappointed in the sheets, the adhesive surface wears off very quickly and after that I had to resort to taping the papers/fabrics etc down with masking tape.   You get two with the machine, one low tack for papers and one standard sheet for heavier card stock and fabric, plus the aforementioned fabric carrier sheet which is extra sticky.   I understand that the sticky can be invigorated, if that's the proper word by wiping the sheet with non-alcholic baby wipes.  I have baby wipes but it doesn't say whether they are alcohol based or not so daren't use them.  If you use water or alcohol based products to clean them you remove all the stickiness completely.  So on my shopping list today are non-alcohol baby wipes and low tack tape (painter's tape).

Having said all that I love it.  There are lots of designs on the machine, enough to get you started working creatively but if you wish to do your own thing, as I do then you need to download Brother ScanNCut.  Its a free program, fairly basic but there is a lot you can do with it and it allows you to convert jpeg files and other cutting files in SVG format. into the fmc format used by Brother. I think the Silhouette Cameo uses SVG format so if anyone has some of those digital designs they can be converted using this program and used with the Brother machine.

I have managed to get a few cards done using designs from a site called SVGcuts.com here they are.

The four card designs all come from the above company but the one below I created myself using the  ScanNCut Canvas program.

It's a book card for Julie's birthday, which is next Saturday, each letter is a separate page.  I have yet to finish decorating it.  I'm going to add some butterflies (in Pink of course as Julie loves Pink), flowers and the odd swirl and stamped image.  I've just tied them together with a bit of cord to give you an idea of what it will be like.  I've got a similar one to make for my brother whose birthday is the same day as Julie's.

Now for the postcard I made using the designs on the machine itself.

I cut out the fish and several of the wave borders to create the sea.  It's Jan's birthday card and she wanted an Under the Sea theme.  The colours are a bit more lively than appear here.