My New Best Friend

After hemming and hawing over an electronic paper cutter for over a year, I finally took the plunge and bought me one.  Here's my new baby, the Silhouette CAMEO.

For such a long time, I wanted the cricut because that is all that I saw in the store and after finding no deals for black Friday, I decided to wait.  Good thing that I waited because just as I finally decided upon purchasing the Expressions 2 machine, I discovered the cameo and I love it.  I have boxes and boxes of punches right now and the thought of not having to replace boxes of punches with boxes of cartridges was enlightening.  Doing my research, I learned that the cricut requires you to purchase additional cartridges in order to cut different designs and you are limited to their designs.  I decided upon the cameo because I wouldn't have to spend oodles of money on cartridges and that I am not limited to their designs.  I can create my own if I wanted.  For me that would be the deal breaker.

The other major difference between the two is that the cricut does not require a computer to operate.  It works on its own.  The cameo does require a computer as an interface.  If you don't want to lug around a laptop, then the cricut might be for you.  I don't mind and would prefer using my laptop to create my images.  The only time I need the cameo is to cut so I can sit anywhere, design and save the image to cut it out later if needed.  I'd rather have my laptop verses carrying around different cartridges.

I was able to snag 96 free images right out of the box.  50 were already loaded in the software and there were 45 more online I was able to get for free.  The last free image I snagged was the free image of the week.  I'm off to a great start, being able to use it right away with no purchases.  I love the "free" image of the week.  I just wish I was downloading them while I contemplated the purchase.  That would have given me a lot more images.

After selecting and resizing my images, it is time to cut.  It looks exactly like a printer, but instead of ink, there is a blade (although, you could use pens in place of the blade to draw).

After the cut, I peeled the paper off the mat for my image cut.

Love it!

Now, you wouldn't think that I purchased this beauty at retail price, now would you?  I did a lot of searching to find the best deal.  This is what I did.  I found a coupon code for 25% off a $100 purchase at ohmycrafts.com.  When I went there, I noticed that the item was delayed in shipping due to high demand.  I really didn't want to wait for who knows when to get my cameo so therefore, I went to fotobella.com (which had no wait time) where I emailed customer service to get a price match for the item.  They verified the purchase price and sent me a link to purchase the cameo for the discounted price.  It retails for $299, but was on sale at ohmycrafts for $269.99.  After applying the coupon code, the price dropped to $202.49.  The one bad thing is that you do have to pay $15 for shipping, BUT $217.49 was still the best price.  I saved $52.50 AND I was able to get it in 3 days.  Isn't that fantastic?  Who'd thought you could price match over the internet?