Today I finally sat down to play with my new Silhouette SD! I’ve been intrigued by the personal electronic cutting machines for a while now, and I’m ecstatic to finally have one of my own to play with!
I know you’re probably super jealous, but I’ve got good news for you.
Now through June 29th, you can get the Silhouette SD and 2 packages of temporary tattoo paper for $199! That’s $120 off!
Just use the Promo code “WHAT“
Also, all other Silhouette shop items are 25% off through the 29th!
So onto the review!
Setting up the machine and installing the software took ten minutes, tops. Super easy.
You get some cool designs with the machine. There are cakes, flowers, leaves, and hearts, along with a pattern for a box and patterns for a card and envelope combo. Right out of the box with just the included designs, you could make a custom gift box and matching card for a birthday, shower, Mother’s Day… That rocks.
I downloaded a few designs from the Silhouette Online Store, which was easy to navigate and has TONS of designs. I’m a Halloween fanatic, so I was excited to see that they have 26 pages of Halloween designs. I can NOT wait until Halloween. My house is going to be decked out.
My favorite items in the online stores were the 3D designs. They have tons of gift box patterns (as I mentioned before), but also 3 dimensional sculptures, baskets, and decorations you can cut out and assemble.
The designs are inexpensive and you get to choose the individual designs you want, a huge step up from the cartridge style machines where you have to buy a whole set even if you only want one of the designs. Oh yeah, the BEST part is that you can cut your OWN DESIGNS. That was the most important feature for me.
Okay, let’s get cutting!
I chose a poseable skeleton design that I downloaded. I cut this one on plain white printer paper just as a quick test. The Silhouette design software was very easy to use. Scaling, moving, and deleting parts of the design is simple and user friendly. It took about 4 minutes for the machine to cut the skeleton (and it made all sorts of adorable R2D2 style noises while it did so).
My next project is going to be cutting some appliques because this thing cuts fabric! Awesome. They also have heat transfer materials available so you can make custom shirts, bags, etc, adhesive vinyl for stickers… so if you think the Silhouette SD is only for scrapbooking, you’re wrong!
7 thoughts on “Silhouette SD digital cutter review”
I am so happy to see someone else using this awesome tool! We bought it to make our wedding invitations and it was well worth the $$$. My brilliant husband set it up to work with another program so we could have the machine cut to our settings and whether to use perforations, deep cuts, or shallow cuts for folding. We used velum inserts and a lightweight brown recycled paper designed to be both the envelope itself and have our names cut out inside with cut out square windows showing a velum insert printed with b&w photos of us. Coolest invitations ever (IMHO).
Sounds awesome! I had wondered for a while if I’d actually use a machine like this very much, but now that I’ve played with it, I can’t stop thinking of new things to do with it!
CJBEAR – Can you give the name of the software that allowed you to do shallow cuts?
Tell me more about this machine and what it can do
I still have this in box never been used. Do these even work with current technology??
I’m not sure, as I no longer have my cutter, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work!
Yes, my machine still works just fine. I think the advantage of other cutters is that they solved some of the silly problems. For example I borrowed someone’s Cricut Explore Air machine and the fact it has raise guides to truly keep the paper straight was amazing. But my machine from 2008 is still kicking just fine. I just need to replace the sticky loader to keep things still.