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So, do you love your SCAL? Would you recommend it to a friend? Do you have any tips, advice on where to purchase, or frustrations with it? Any information that you could provide would be most appreciated! TIA
I love SCAL. I mostly use it to cut TTF... I haven't played with making my own .svg files, but I hope to! They just came out with 2.0. I have bought the original from www.cutterscreek.com & from the upgrade from www.surecutsalot.com. It's worth it in my opinion! Good Luck!
I love it and think it's an essential purchase if you have a cricut. There's so little to actually using it that the only tip I can think of is if you're making your own designs in a graphics programme is to set the dpi to 90dpi in both scal & your graphics programme. Also don't go too mad downloading fonts unless you are running a font management programme. I ended up with several thousand fonts installed which slowed my pc down terribly and ended up taking me hours uninstalling and moving them.
I love it also. It's so much easier (and cheaper!) to find and save a font on my computer than buy and store all the cartridges that I'd want. A font manager would really come in handy tho
I use a font manager called The Font Thing which I got free from download.com When the programme is open I can view all the fonts I have stored in folders and can chose to temporarily load them or install. As long as the programme is still open I can use the temporarily loaded fonts in any programme I open afterwards, word, paintshop pro, scal etc.
Although I went mad downloading fonts it's something I rarely cut. I prefer to make my own templates in paintshop pro but lots of people either go hunting images online or download svg files from free sites or shops.
I'm not a traditional diecut user but I've made shaped cards, boxes, origamic architecture, "nesties", wordbooks, paperpiecing and I've even scanned in stamped images, blacked them out so it's just an outline and used that to cut perfectly shaped mats & layers. For me scal is the best craft gadget I've ever bought and 14 years worth of papercrafting has meant I've got quite a lot of gadgets.
I am a long time Cricut user. I highly recommend SCAL if you have a Cricut. It takes your Cricut to another level. Makes it one of the most powerful die cutting machines on the market. I have all the die cutting machines.
My only frustration with SCAL is that I don't like how all our tools covers up our work space.
Then you need those tools so closing them is not option. You can rearrange them but it still covers your workspace, lol.
I like clean & uncluttered when I am designing or laying out a project.
You're only limited by your own imagination and the constraints of the cs you want to cut Annie.
DeeAnn with scal2 you can move the tool boxes to one side and save it as a workspace as well as zoom in and out. Really makes a difference if you're another neat freak like me.. just wish I could work as tidily when I'm playing with real paper & ink ;)
My understanding is that SCAL is for PC's and not for MAC's. A bummer for me as we have mac's in our home. I guess I will have to wait for a mac version unless someone can share info that I do not know about. I'd love to be able to use it.
Scal1 is or at least it was available for the mac, however before you can buy you have to confirm that your cricut has the right firmware. If it doesnt have the right firmware you would need to hook your cricut to someone elses laptop/pc and use cds (trial is good enough) to update the firmware.
scal2 for the mac is being worked on at the moment. Although it does have some nifty tools I was more than happy with scal1 and only updated because I like the idea of importing svgs at the exact size I'd made them in.
If SCAL 2 is being worked on for the mac, then I think I will wait. I get a feeling that it will be out there soon. If anyone finds out in the future that it is ready, I hope they post a thread in the forum. Since I really do not even know the answer to this, where does one purchase SCAL from? Thank you suplayingwith paper for your response, it does help me alot.
My understanding is that SCAL is for PC's and not for MAC's. A bummer for me as we have mac's in our home. I guess I will have to wait for a mac version unless someone can share info that I do not know about. I'd love to be able to use it.
I have SCAL and a Mac. I works just fine. There is one glitch sorta thing with it. After each cut is finish, I need to turn off the Cricut then back on to cut another file. Otherwise it seems to lock everything up. Once I found that out (from their forums) I've had no problems.
I love SCAL and they do plan on upgrading it for mac users by end of year I believe it what they were saying.
Your Circut needs certain software (and I'm not sure which software that is) I believe to use SCAL. That did prove a bit difficult. I downloaded a trial version of Design Studio and burned on a CD. Got a friend of my sons with a pc laptop and he installed that trial version on it. Then we hooked up the Cricut to his laptop and it installed the new software version onto the Cricut. After all that, I was able to hook the cricut up to my mac.
What software ones Cricut has in it, I don't remember.
Moral of this story...Anything is possible
__________________ Penny ~ Scrappin' Moments Blog Goals ~ Jan 2011 Double-Layouts 5/4 ~ Blog Posts 1/2 ~ Quilts 1/1 ~ 60/60 Shower Invites
It depends, for me my expressions didnt have the right firmware when I bought it 18 months ago so I had to use the trial version of cds to update. Took about 5 minutes and it was pretty easy to do. Once the firmware was on the cricut I never needed to think about it again. Now all I do is start scal, switch on the cricut and start playing. If you've used CDS the cricut will already have the firmware on it.
I've been using SCAL with my Mac for quite a while now. I don't have to turn it on and off after each cut.
The really nice thing about Todd at Craftedge is that he makes things available for both PC and Mac.
If you have a newer Mac and have it set up to run Windows also, you can use that to update your firmware.
I've been using SCAL with my Mac for quite a while now. I don't have to turn it on and off after each cut.
The really nice thing about Todd at Craftedge is that he makes things available for both PC and Mac.
If you have a newer Mac and have it set up to run Windows also, you can use that to update your firmware.
I don't know why I have to turn the cricut off and on with each cut. If I don't SCAL freezes up and I end up having to force quit. I've read on the message boards that it happens to a lot of macs. It was there that one said turning off and on will keep it from freezing up. That has worked.
I'm hoping the 2.0 version due out end of year will address that issue, as well as some nice added features.
__________________ Penny ~ Scrappin' Moments Blog Goals ~ Jan 2011 Double-Layouts 5/4 ~ Blog Posts 1/2 ~ Quilts 1/1 ~ 60/60 Shower Invites
Since I do not have SCAL yet, I'm waiting for the new MAC release to come out. Hey, it's already Sept 22 so the end of the year is not that far away. I'm hoping they might even have it ready sooner.
Owners of SCAL
