My New Die Cutting Machine-Like a kid in a candy store

My husband, aka the man that loves me enough to support my craft nerd obsession, got me the best Christmas present a girl like myself could ask for (other than shoes), a die cutting machine! This amazing little machine, the Silhouette SD, is my first foray into the world of die cutting and I'm officially hooked.  It's like this magical little box that cuts out any shape I want with the tiniest of details. The best thing about it all of the shapes (there's over 10,000 of them) are downloadable online for .99 each.  So you don't have to buy cartridges to plug into the machine like I've seen with other systems. This magic box also comes with it's own program that's sort of like a dumbed down photoshop which allows you to create and manipulate your own shapes. I have not messed around with creating my own yet but I'm sure there will be another blog entry when I get around to it. And best of all you can type in the program with any font you want and it will cut them out.  Silhouette also has a blog with cool tutorials and how-tos in it. The capabilities of this things are amazing, I haven't even begun to scratch the surface.  It can do magnet paper, rhinestone designs, vinyl and what seems like a million other things.

Here's some examples of a few of the machine's contributions to my scrapbooking pages, pretty simple for now but they add a punch to the page:

The bamboo plants were cut by the Silhouette

The pink branches were cut by the Silhouette

The "remember this" was cut by the Silhouette

If you are interested in this gem I'll give you a little piece of advice, it's runs $300 in most stores, but you can buy it on Overstock for $181.98.

Warning, you will become obsessed and those .99 downloads add up.  Never fear, they offer these fantastic monthly subscriptions.  So I pay $19.99/month and get $150 worth of downloads, a pretty damn good deal in my book of deals