Mon, 15 Jun 2020

Well, I’m never going to be a Cricut brand ambassador, that’s for sure.

I have an aging Silhouette Cameo. Silhouette has always been a little vague about the early version numbers, and I think “Cameo 1” covers a couple of slightly different models, but anyway, I have an old Cameo. It’s gotten progressively more noisy, and has some slightly worn gears, and I don’t really think it could cut marine vinyl/PU leather without stripping gears even if I got a deep-cut blade.

I bought the Cameo rather than the Cricut because back then, Cricut really really wanted you to only use their cartridges. I helped Cricut-owning family members get set up with Sure Cuts A Lot to bypass that. I actually bought the Cameo for my husband to cut circuit-board masking stencils, and have kinda re-appropriated it over the years. It “prints” directly out of Inkscape with a plugin, so I’ve never been worried about lack of support.

Anyway, I was excited that the Maker could do chipboard, mat board, and, one assumes, Davey board. I was excited about marine vinyl. I was excited about cutting wood. I don’t have a Windows desktop, but I do have the iPad Mini that serves as my business device, and Cricut Design Space runs on that. So even though I was bothered by the software lock-in, when CamelCamelCamel told me the price came down within range I bought one.

It’s now sitting on my porch waiting for the UPS person to take it back.

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Cricut Design Space, iOS version

Saturday, I sat down to make a Father’s Day card, hoping to finally figure out how to keep the scoring lines aligned with the cutting lines – the iOS version of Design Space, at least, is clunky and recalcitrant. And I got the message at the top of this post. I fought with it for quite awhile before trying some of the SVG’s I had used on the Mother’s Day cards. Lo and behold, they got the same message. Deleting and reinstalling the app didn’t help. Cricut tech support is weekdays only – can’t fault them for that in These Trying Times, except don’t do Friday releases then. (Seriously, as a former IT person: never do Friday releases ever.)

I bet the Cameo would be just fine if I got some replacement gears for it.