Cricut Expressions & Gypsy

Today at work I got to demo the Cricut Expressions and Gypsy tool. I'd never used either machine before but after a short guidance from another employee I was ready to go.

The best feature of getting the Gypsy with the Cricut in my opinion is that you don't have to keep all the cartridges and key-sets laying around and switch every time you want to cut something. The Gypsy has a full list of cartridges and the ones you've loaded are highlighted with bold text. The stylus pen was easy to use and the cuts were nice and clean. I was very impressed, so were many of the people who stopped by to watch the demo.

Another good feature that many people liked was it's portability. You can take the Gypsy anywhere with you, say on the road back from your vacation, and start planning out what shapes you'll want to cut out for your scrapbook. Then you can save your layouts and cut them all out when you get home!

2 negative issues I found are how much space the Cricut needs, both in front of and behind it. I wouldn't have room for it anywhere. Second was that when you load a cartridge in the Gypsy you then can not load it in any other Gypsy. If you like to get a group together to do scrapbooking you may find it not worth using the Gypsy because you won't be able to share designs. I suppose if you all share the Gyspy and chip in on the cost of the cartridges it would work out well but there'd be no way to split it up if someone leaves.

Another product I demo'd today did NOT work so well, The Slice by Making Memories. Like the Cricut it uses cartridges but these are small, almost like digital camera memory sticks. It worked well when making gift tags & shapes, though it was not sharp enough to cut through a heavy card-stock. When it came to making words, as was my task in the demo, it just would not participate. It kept catching on the cuts when it passed back over them and we ended up with a wrinkled mess. We tried several weights of paper and the only one that didn't catch was the heavy card-stock but it didn't cut all the way through so you'd still have to do some work to cut it out.