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Joined: 6/5/2010(UTC)
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Location: South Texas Coast, MQ #349
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One of the best features of the Gypsy is its portability. It is a hand-held design platform for the Cricut machines, and one of the things I love about it is that I can take it anywhere!! It fits in my purse (no, I do not carry a suitcase!) and holds a charge for designing for at least ten hours of activity. They do recommend that you have it plugged in to update and cut, as both of these activities will drain your power fast.
I only have the baby bug (although there is a rumor that Santa is bringing me the E!!) and with my Gypsy my baby works a lot like the E, only I'm limited to cutting on a 6x12 mat. I plan 12x12 LO's on the 12x12 mat, then crowd all my cuts to one side and change to the 6x12 mat for cutting (if they're all the same paper). The G will do a lot of the tricks the E does, like multiple images (nice when you have several images grouped and you can duplicate the entire group and not have to re-space everything), flip, rotate, skew (sp?) and change proportions on any cut. As long as your images touch, you can weld them together (I can cut my name or title in one piece instead of a bunch of individual letters that I have to try to glue on a page in a straight line). The Gypsy Wanderings doesn't have a blackout feature, but by using "hide contours" I took the spots out of a butterfly's wings, cut the original and my contoured design and had a perfect blackout - the blackout showed through the wing holes.
I even use it for carts I have but haven't linked. I often do the Cuts RAK (where we post requests from carts we don't have and cut for each other and swap by mail), and all I can set on my bug is the height. If someone wants "merry Christmas" cut 4" long, how do I know what size? I paste the image to the mat, and with the gold link on, set the width to 4", read off the height, and round to the closest I can set with my bug. Then I set the height I just got from the trial, and see if it still comes close to 4" long.
I've just scratched the surface here. The G, I'm convinced, will do just about anything but wash the dishes. Although I have to say, I made 25 identical card fronts for a swap while doing dishes, laundry and cleaning a bathroom. I rotated and squeezed as many images as I could fit (or needed) for each color of paper and saved the files by color. Then I hooked G up to my bug, prepped a mat with the right color paper, and started cutting. Off I went to dishes, bathroom, whatever. I could hear when baby bug was finished cutting. Unload the mat, collect my pieces, scrape the mat and put on the next color, pull up the file and again, baby bug cut while I did my chores. In two hours I had all my cuts done, the dishes washed and the laundry washed, folded, put away and had a nice clean bathroom. Voila! Crafting without guilt!!
I hope you get a Gypsy, I love the portability and design potential of this little machine. And we have a photo app.! Right now, it's just a file of pics, but I can see pulling up a photo, putting it on the mat and cutting a shape out of the photo (of course you would need a print to put on the physical mat to do this). Lots of untapped potential here!
HTH!Edited by user Tuesday, November 09, 2010 1:33:08 PM(UTC)
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