My New Brother Scan N Cut Machine Updated

I recently got a Brother Scan N Cut die cutting machine. I'm not new to die cutting machines. I have a couple of Cricuts. I love the Cricut machines and I have many of the cartridges for them. I finally decided, I wanted to have more choices for my card making, than what I have with the Cricut. I decided with the Brother Scan N Cut machine because it can scan what I want without being connected to a computer and then cut the item, giving me more options. Other machines cut using the computer. The Brother has an online untility option call the Canvas, which I thought I wouldn't use too much, since the scanning directly into the machine was a great avenue. You can use a USB drive to take work from the Canvas online to the die cutting machine.

Here is an Easter card, which I made just from using the files (already programed) inside the Brother Scan N Cut:

I love to use my rubber stamps and thought it would be great to stamp the ones I like and not have to do the fussy cutting for them. Well, the Brother scanner is picky and unless the stamp has one continuous solid line around the stamp, it will not cut! You can add a line with a pencil or pen...I haven't been successful with that yet. That leaves a few of my stamps out! When it does cut, it cuts nicely. The machine is able to cut a variety of different materials including fabrics. The machines comes with a standard cutting blade and a deep cutting blade, as well as a low tack mat and a standard mat, which I use often for cardstock or heavier materials. The trouble is the mats lost their grip as I used them the very first day. I have cleaned them with the suggested wipes per the instruction manual, but they still need me to either use painter's tape or my fingers to hold the item to be cut. This of course got worse after I sued the deep cutting blade on the standard mat to cut the shapes from the Timtex interfacing, which I used for my grandson's felt board characters. I did clean the mats after the process.

It certainly was very neat to be able to take a digital file which I bought online and print it from my computer with my printer and then scan it into the Scan N Cut, save it and then cut the interfacing figures, which I later hand painted. For my first set of felt figures I made patterns from my Cricut, hand traced and cut them and then painted them. Here are the results of my project:

 I think my 4 year old grandson is going to like "The Three Bears" don't you think?

For more pictures and information on felt boards, Check out my blog post "Designing Felt Boards."

Although I really enjoyed this new machine during the few projects I made, later on it did not live up to what I expected...it was either a defective machine or it has more problems than I was will to work out. Regrettably, I was forced to decided returning it was the thing to do.