Help/Advice with Scrapbooking tool ? Cricut?

[Zookeeper9000]

I was wondering if anyone has one of the Cricut scrapbooking Machines and if so do you think the $300 expense and the $50 to $100 cartridges are worth the expense. I am expanding my scrapbooking tools and think that this one would be great but am not sure if the expense will be worth it.

I have to scrapbook like crazy this year as I have 3 kids out of the home and want to get their childhood pictures on pages so that they are in their homes instead of mine. I would also like to get my son's done so it is done before he graduates in 2011. Add my 2 grandbabies who will be 4 and 2 this month and there ya go.

Now I do have all kinds of scrapbooking tools. I am like one of those weekend fixer uppers who have to have the new cool tools LOL. I confess I am one of those as well.

But I do use all my tools for scrapbooking even if I am not scrapbooking with them LOL.

Any help and opinions would be nice. Also any ideas on the cartridges I can't live without would be nice. I already got plans for cars and disney princesses LOL.

 

[showme31]

I couldn't imagine life without mine. I bought the original. After talking to the local scrapbook store owner, she said it was all the home scrapper needed. That being said, there has been a couple of times that I would've like to have had the Expression. But those have been for use at school, I'm PTO president and have made several signs promoting our activities. But for those projects I just made do and it all came out nicely. In fact, I use my cricut at school as much as at home.

I currently have 16 cartridges and can't imagine life without any of them. If hubby wasnt' currently out of work I'd have several more. I love the fact I can make whatever title letters I want without wasting pages of stickers.

You can get good deals on cartridges. I don't think I've paid over $30 for any of my cartridges. But I had to exercise patience while I waited for them to get shipped to me. Here is one of the places that I've ordered several from, they always seem to have some type of sale going on.

http://www.customcrops.com/

I use mine with the design studio. Love that! I also have the jukebox, which allows me to have several cartridges "loaded" and ready to go. I don't have to keep changing cartridges, just push a button.

I can't seem to get enough of mine, and I bet you would love it if you had it.

Smiles
Jul

 

[kimnkell]

I had considered buying the cricut last year around Christmas but I thought I would be rather expensive to buy all the different cartridges so we did some researching before buying one. I decided to go with the wishblade machine. I really like it because you dont' have to buy any cartridges and can use any truetype font available. you can get all kinds of free fonts online for free and then you can also get free gsd files for the wishblade here at this website.

http://www.mydiecuts.com/project/viewer/415

I also have a friend who has the Pazzle cutting machine and she just loves it. You don't have to have any certain cartridges for them either. You can also cut those adorable Chipboard Word books that are so popular now. They look like the Bo Bunny Chipboard books only with the machine you can customize them to say whatever you want them to.
Of course I know lots of girl's that own the cricut and they love em.

Good Luck and Happy Scrappin!

Kim