I just got my Cricut and lovin it
I am a digital scrapper at heart but when I finally broke down and bought the Cricut for myself for my birthday (that is the only way I get anything I want! LOL!) I started researching all about it and now I am all excited to be a Hybrid Scrapper.
There are many ways to make it inexpensive once you have it. By the way I had the Sillouette before too but never used it. Weird me... Anyhow, there are ways to make the mat sticky again. There are a few blogs I frequent now that explain how to do this cheaply. First and foremost is the Zig 2 way pen (you can get at Walmart!). Get the large tip and just roll it on. Let it set 20 minutes and it is as good as new. Now there are also products out there like Quilters Basting Spray and there is another product out there that I can not remember what it is called but it takes all the sticky product off the mat before you put more on so that you don't have all the bumps you get from things like glitter paper. All these products are under $10 to my knowledge and they last forever!
I got the Sure Cuts A Lot at the same time and yes, you can use any type of True Type Font with it and it will replace having to buy cartridges. Just look around on the net or all those wonderful free font sites like dafont. Also, you can find great pay for fonts for $1 or $2 that gives you numerous images all at once, sometimes up to 50 per font. Now remember you can use your shadow feature to make it a solid image so then you have even more shapes.
With the Cricut you can do almost any type of cutting with it. You can even cut heavy products like the chipboard and even plastic (I even watched a video today on how to cut fabric). A good source I have found is you tube for instructions on all these things.
As for vinyl cutting, the vinyl made for the Cricut is expensive. I have found a place that a lot of people use. You can get a large amount for a decent price compared to the Cricut brand. They are from signwarehouse.
Also, I have heard that you can google free .cut files and there are supposedly a lot of blogs that make .cut files that you save to your computer and then just access them through your Sure Cuts A Lot software and use them that way. Also, if you have PSP which I assume you do have you can make your own .cut files. I believe a lot of graphic programs you can make them on.
I guess the best feature that I like is that you can use the center feature and move your cutter to the center of a photo or image and then it will cut it out in that shape. So many possibilities. I need to stop watching all the how to videos now and get making more things.
I hope that helps a little.
