The Silhouette Cameo Cutter for Scrapbooking!

Know what this is? What?? You don’t? Well, it’s one of the coolest tools to come around for scrapbooking.

Forget about buying any more die cuts. Forget about buying those fancy expensive 3D stickers and decorations for your pages. And, forget about spending hours and hours searching for just the right items to complement your pages!

Silhouette Cameo will cut all of these things for you.

Upon opening the box, you’ll find an assortment of cords, more boxes, dvds and user manuals. Despite the tangle of items, it’s very simple to get it set up. Kind of like plug and play (into your computer). You’ll install the drivers, plug it in, turn it on and you’re good to go! Except… while this awesome tool will do an awful lot to dress up your pages, there is a learning curve, so don’t expect to turn it on and start cutting. Rather, take a few sheets of different colors, load the library and practice. Then, go to the blog (which you can actually access from inside the program) for more inspiration than you can imagine.

On the site you can get the designs you want, most for only .99 and some even for as low as .50! And, there’s a free shape to download every week. And, there is stuff on sale all the time too. I find this much better than the other cutter, whose cartridges cost roughly 40.00 and may only contain 3 or 4 images that you want.

The Silhouette Cameo cuts not only paper in all thicknesses (up to 12″), but also fabric and vinyl to make those cool vinyl banners. It cuts heat transfer material and rhinestone templates and specialty media also such as wood paper, magnetic paper and transparencies.  Thinking about trying out a tatoo? The Cameo cuts that too and on their website you can get all of these things along with spare blades, cutting mats, totes, ink, rhinestones, sketching pens, tools, etching cream, and you can buy download cards too.

Want more ideas? Check out the site for printable classes and instructions, and the latest updates to the drivers, but definitely check out the blog for all kinds of tips and tricks.

While I didn’t really put the Cameo through everything it could do, I did enough to realize what it could do, and what it could save me in the scrapbook stores. One of the coolest things I found was that I could print, in color, an image and then cut it out to be used on my pages. Pretty cool. All in all, out of a 10, I’m giving it a 7, with the possibility of a higher rating once I play with it some more and get used to it.

What didn’t I like? There is a pretty steep learning curve, you can’t just plug it in and make your pages, at least I couldn’t. I couldn’t find a lot of answers to my questions in the instruction manuals, user manuals, dvds, tutorials and support sections, however, once I stumbled upon the blog, all was good. This is important, THE BLOG is your go to place for tutorial and how to!

As a special promo from Silhouette, you get the Cameo and your choice of a starter kit for only $299.00 until Oct 31, 2011 at http://www.silhouetteamerica.com with the promo code:  GOSSIP

But hurry, there’s only a certain amount of Silhouette CAMEOs available at this price and they will sell out quickly!