Last week I made a bit of an impulse purchase of a Brother ScanNcut machine. A friend at a dinner party had mentioned that these existed, and I became intrigued, did a bit of web-trawling and found the CM900 on offer. So I pressed ‘buy’!

It took a week to arrive, which was frustrating, and then I had to go into work and other various things stopped me opening the box until this morning. My first test cuts were not successful, until I discovered it’s necessary to close down the handle of the knife holder! Ha ha, silly me!

After that it was a matter of testing the blade depth, based on the recommended depths, until the blade cut the paper but did not go into the mat too far. I’ve discovered that it seems to always mark the mat, but when thinking about this, to cut through its probably always going to do this.

The other thing I struggled with a bit was how to position the image and paper so that the cut is where you want it. A bit of maths and spatial understanding is needed for this, and I am still getting the knack.

The built in patterns are fine for practising on the machine, but I aim to work on the Canvas software later on today and transfer files by USB or wifi.

Editing on the machine’s screen is quite easy, you can resize, crop, flip, mirror and combine (weld) images to make your own outlines. So far I have made scallop edge with a cut out border above, not brilliant, but testing out how it all operates.

Apparently there is dust inside the lens of my phone, hence the dark spot at the top of the photos, great

Another technical glitch!

Any way back to the ScanNcut, so far I love it! Can’t wait to try other papers/cards and fabrics.