She Has Arrived!

I ordered my 24 inch Black Cat Cougar on July 15, 2011. Yesterday, August 9, 2011, she arrived. All shiny and new! And since she is new for me, I've created a new place here to share her with everyone else. Happy birthday to me! (My birthday is this coming Saturday...)

They call my old die cutting machine the "Crapcut" and although I have never had great difficulty using the old machine, it is quite a lot of crap that owners of that machine can only cut what we are allowed to cut by purchasing high priced cartridges from the same manufacturer. You would think after laying out several hundreds of dollars for a die cutter of that sort that you would be able to cut whatever image you saw fit -- whether you design the image yourself or get a JPEG or other image file from somewhere... But no, they limit you to only using their images which may or may not be suited to the project you have at hand. They even went as far as suing TWO companies whose software provided other options for cutting for Crapcut owners. Geez...is that a bit drastic or what? They just want all the money for themselves...

Well, if I was going to be stuck with purchasing high priced cartridges for the rest of my life, that means that my ROI would be nil. I would never be able to generate any income sufficient to cover the cost of constantly purchasing new carts to get the images I need, along with the paper and other items that you need for the project. So, what did I do? Turned over one fat HUNK of money ONE time to the makers of the Cougar. Now I can cut using the Cougar's native software -- Inkscape and SignCut Pro -- or by using one of many design software such as Illustrator and CorelDraw. Best yet, I can use SCAL or MTC with my machine also!

Yes, the Cougar is a pricey machine. But look at it this way -- would you rather layout that kinda cash ONCE and cut WHATEVER you want FOREVER, or would you want to layout a significantly less amount of money for a cutter only to have to BUY more images to cut what you want FOREVER? Trust, if you are a die hard paper crafter you will end up spending more with the Crapcut + cartridges than the one-time layout for the Cougar...

Oh! By the way... "Black Dymonz" is the name she is being given. Therefore, the blog is named for her!