On my last entry I said I'd re-applied the adhesive to the embossing mat.  The difference it made is amazing :D.  The cuts are much cleaner now and we've made a few things with no problem what so ever.

The other day, surfing through my blog roll, I found a link to a very interesting box, called impossible box.

The original box is a jpeg file for a square box (the black one with the read trim in the picture).  When I first imported the file into the software, I tried to vectorize it.  Eventually I gave up on that idea as I was getting a lot of round corners.  Since the box is basically straight lines, I used it as a template and did all the lines again.

After I was done with the first one, I began wondering if other shapes would work as well.  When J got home, we began talking about it and eventually came up with the pentagonal one.
In theory, any polygon will work.  The only problem is finding out the angles to make the lid collapse properly.

J changed the bottom, so they look like a flower (as seen on the blue one).  I think, with a little manipulation, a similar effect can be used on the lid.

Yay for tips!

Even though I didn't find much about the PI before we bought it (truth be told, I didn't go looking) and damaged the mat that came with it, I paid close attention to the many tips I read ever since.

One of the first tips I read had to do with cleaning the mats. Some people recommend baby wipes, so today I gave it a try.
My results are as follow:

1. the original mat: I was amazed at how much cleaner it looks now. I rubbed the wipe lightly over the mat and when it was dry it became sticky again.

2. embossing mat: It did get clean, but it took longer to dry and the adhesive came out - it's possible this happened because I scrubed a bit to hard.

I've also read about re-applying the adhesive, and knowing we would eventually need to do it, we already had some spray adhesive at hand. I used quilting adhesive because I read about it here.

Now I'll go try them out and see how the work :)

Countdown to mother's day

J has been playing with the Inspiration software, designing a pop-up card for his mother.  He did a pretty good prototype while he was at work and I was surprised to find out how well he can use the software that came with the PI.

While he was playing with the computer and cutting away, I went through my OA books, trying to find something similar he could use.

He dismissed all my suggestions, although he did get a few ideas about the construction of pop-up cards.  He actually created a pretty good design that works as intended, but in the end I think he got cold feet and went with one of the designs I had selected, scanned and vectorized on the laptop.

Sadly, I don't have pictures of the design he created or of the final card he made.  I do have a photo of another one I did when he was taking a break:

I used paper I got from when I signed up with Club Scrap.  The design is from the book A Paradise of Origamic Architecture by Chatani and Nakazawa.

If I could turn back time...

...I'd had signed up with a few discussion lists and fora before I got the PI. Had I done so I'd had learned that:

1. I needed to upgrade both software and hardware before trying to use it for the first time,
2. There are many generous people out there who took the time to write tutorials, make videos, blog about the machine

My Pazzles came with a 6 months free membership to their craft room. There you can find a good number of videos that walks you through some of the most basic functions, some how-to's and a good number of more advanced techniques.

On the side bar (-->) there are links to some blogs and here are a few groups I found useful:

- creativcutters
- funtimesoftware
- pazzlesinspiration
- pazzlesinspirationpals


Since I didn't follow the advice I'm giving here, I have a ruined cutting mat (for which I have no replacement) and my blade is probably damaged. :(
The extra time I spent trying to get the results I wanted wasn't such a bad thing, as I learned a little bit more about the software in the process.

BTW, on the funtimesoftware group I found a great tutorial about lattices that made creating a triangular grid much easier.

It's here!

We got the PI today. I took it out of the box, put it on the table and went for the instructions.
It comes with a book of instructions/tutorials, but I was too excited to read it all, so, I read the very basic and hooked it up to the laptop.

I installed the software, read a bit more, put the embossing tool in, put some paper on the embossing mat and went on the web to find a triangular grid.

I created a grid using this website, downloaded a pdf, copied and pasted it into the PI software. Now, all I had to do is vectorize it and emboss it.
Well, after 4+ hours, a huge headache, countless freezes of the software and a urge to throw everything out, I quit.

When J got home we came to the conclusion that I was asking to much from the software. Even though the grid is only straight lines, there are way too many of those. We came to the conclusion that we could achieve the same result by placing tiny triangles side by side. I was done with it for the day, so J did it.
We did get a grid, though the triangle approach is counter-productive - he came up with a simpler, more efficient method later.

By the time we had a grid in hands it was around 10:00 p.m.. The paper had been sitting on the mat since somewhere around noon. When I peeled it of the mat, some of the sticky thing from the mat was attached to the paper. :P

Lesson of the day: Do not let the paper sit on the mat for too long.

Buying the cutter

So, the other day I was watching Scrapbook Memories and in the last segment they talked about the Pazzles Inspiration studio. I wasn't very impressed until they mentioned that it doesn't use cartridges and that it can be used to emboss.

Wait! What?! That sounded promissing. We did a little research and the more we read, the more we liked it. Then another search for good prices and we were ready to buy.
We transfered money from our savings account, found an Amazon seller with a great price and made the purchase.
Less than 24 hours later, I get an email telling me the transaction was cancelled. I was puzzled, as I knew we had the money. I went to the store and they still had the cutter for sale. I fired an email to my husband and he told me the money wasn't available for us anymore (meaning the seller had a hold on it). I then sent a message to the seller inquiring why our transaction was cancelled.
The seller took his sweet time "answering". The loose translation was "not our fault". Now, we had also bought a few accessories for the cutter from other sellers.
At the end of the day, we bought the cutter from Amazon itself and it got here safe, sound and fast. It did bother me, though, that I kept on getting boxes with accessories for something I didn't have yet.