Cricut - Personal Electronic Cutter Review

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Transcript of Featured Review

Today I would like to review for you one of my very favorite product that I have ever gotten. And it is this little machine right here behind me. You might be wondering what this is. Or you might be a scrap booker who already knows what this is. This is the Cricket Personal Electronic Cutter. Basically what a cricket does is it takes paper and it cuts it into a variety of shapes or letters for you like a di-cut machine. Except for that it is electronic. I d like to show you a little demonstration of how this cricket machine works. To begin we press this button and it opens up revealing a keypad at the top. The cutting that goes on down here down here and the cartridge. Now the cartridge is a font. My Cricket came with the George and Basic shapes font. But you can get a variety of different cartridges. And plug them in and there will be different fonts. You actually remove the area over the keyboard when you are switching fonts. This is George and basic shapes. But if it was a different cartridge it might say the name of that cartridge s name. And there would be different shapes and different letters to do. I am sure right now you are all anxious to see a demonstration of the Cricket. So we can zoom in and take a closer look at that. So the first thing that we do when we are about to use our Cricket is we use this cutting mat that comes with the Cricket. This cutting mat is a sticky surface. And it is six inches by 12 inches. And what you do is you place a sheet of paper. I have this sheet of paper all ready to go. And you place it on the sticky mat and you make sure that it is stuck on there really nice. And when you are about to be ready to use the Cricket you can actually insert it like this. And there is a load of paper option. The sticky mat is one part of the Cricket that you will need to buy refills for because as you use more and more paper the sticky mat will actually become less sticky. But they are not too expensive to buy refills for. Another thing about the Cricket that you might have to buy refills for is the blade. And in a minute here we will see how the blade works. Now that we have the paper loaded into our Cricket as you can see right here we can get red sheets to cut some different shapes out. Like said before the cartridge I have in here is the George and basic shape. And it allows me to cut out some different letters and some different shapes like hearts triangles and even some tags which are really nice. So before we use the Cricket we decide what we would like to cut out. I am going to push some different shapes in here. I am going to select a heart. I am going to select a little tag and I am going to select a triangle. Another thing you have the option of studying is how large you want the shapes to be. This little dial here goes anywhere from one inch all the way up to five and half inches. So you can make some little small shapes. You can make some rather bit one. For the purpose of this demonstration I am going to do a two-and-a-half-inch shape. Also on the side here is you have your speed dial which control how fast your cutting takes place and the pressure dial. These are really important when it comes to what kind of paper you are using. Right now I have some textured cards back in there. But if I were using a lighter weight paper I would want to adjust these. But now we are all ready to go I am going to press the cut button. [Sound of machine]. As you can see the Cricket cuts the shapes. And when you are finished you can press the unload paper button. And the whole thing comes right out. To get the shapes off you simply unpeel the paper. And as you can see what is left on the sticky is the heart the tag and the triangle. And you can peel these off. And you see I have a heart. I have a tag. And I have a triangle. So it was a really handy way to cut out these shapes. And as you just saw my demonstration of the Cricket the Cricket can save you a lot of time and a lot of money. Initially the purchase of the Cricket is a little expensive. It is in the $200 range. And the cartridges are $80 to $90 depending but mine did come with one cartridge to begin with. So that really helps out. But over time instead of going to cut to spend time cutting out a lot of di-cuts or buying a lot of di-cut you got this machine that can do it for you with any paper you like. Now that I am all finished with my Cricket thought I can press the off button and I can fold it back up. And if I want to I can carry it with a little handle which makes it nice and easy to port around.