dip N dollop

Now that I'm seriously getting back in to crafting, I really wanted to get another personal cutter.  I had one of the original Cricuts, but I sold it quite awhile ago on eBay because I honestly never used the thing.  (I got away from the world of crafting for awhile, but trust me, I'm back now and with a vengeance).  Plus, I hated hated hated the fact that every time I wanted to cut something I had to have a cartridge with the specific shape of font I wanted, and if that specific font I wanted wasn't available I had to settle with whatever was available.  Those who know me well know how much I dislike settling when I have a specific idea in mind.  Luckily for me, personal cutters have come a long way in the last three or four years since I was last in the market for one (and so has my budget for one).  So, like the conscientious shopper I - sometimes - am, I hit Google for reviews and feedback on all of the cutters out there.  The only thing I had to be able to do was cut images and fonts directly from my computer.  Who doesn't love Scriptina, Coming Soon, and my personal favorite, Sunshine Poppy?  I didn't really want to spend more than $400 either, since I'm still a college student with a mortgage and student loans to pay.  One of the best sites I found was http://die-cutting-machines-review.toptenreviews.com/.  It was nice because they included a variety of machines, most of which I had never heard of since I've been out of touch for so long.  After reading through and thinking about what I really wanted, I narrowed my options down to three that I wanted to do further research on:

To be honest, the one I really wanted to end up in love with was the eCraft because I loved the fact that it didn't use mats and it had the lowest price tag, and budget is pretty important to me.  A simple Google search convinced me to stay away from that product, however.  There were about as many negative reviews as there were positive ones.  I'm not trying to say that it's a horrible product, but I base a lot of my decisions off of the experiences of others, so the eCraft was not for me.  Maybe after some time and some fine tuning they'll work the kinks out, and if they do I'd love to give this machine a try, because the freedom from mats seems pretty gosh darn awesome to me.  Once the eCraft was eliminated, I was really torn between the Cameo and the Gazelle.  They both get overwhelmingly positive reviews on the internet, and the feature set on both machines is pretty similar.  I searched for the re-sale values on eBay and they both hold their value pretty well, so I decided to order both and try both out to decide which one I like best.