Finally got my Gypsy to work!

I'm so excited! I got a Gypsy for Christmas (to go with my Cricut), and only this week got it to work. Partly because I didn't have any time to devote to it, but mostly because every time I started, I got frustrated because the manual writers knew too well how the product worked by the time they wrote the manual, and are forgetting that most of us that have purchased the product have no idea how to make it work. I had lots of trouble with vague wording like "Cricut device" as used in "plug the Cricut device into the computer". My assumption was that Cricut device is the Cricut cutter (since I knew that had to be updated), but they meant Gypsy. When I wrote technical support to ask, and to say that no combination of cords seemed to work to plug the Cricut cutter into the computer, I got these wonderful trouble shooting tips: "plug the go into the wall, and then plug the g into the computer" What????? I can only assume that they didn't feel like writing out the word Gypsy, so they used "g", except that the second word in the sentence was supposed to mean "g" for Gyspy, not go.

When I finally figured out that the Gypsy was what was supposed to be plugged into the computer the direction was "when on the welcome screen, plug the Gypsy to the computer". Except that apparently when you have a new Gypsy, you have two welcome screens. The first is where you calibrate the machine with the stylus and then accept the terms and conditions. Then there's a second welcome screen that you get every time you turn the Gypsy on after that. So since I hadn't done anything with the machine except turn it on and plug it into the computer, without calibrating the stylus or getting the next screen, my computer kept saying it "couldn't find the device". After I accidentally bumped the Gypsy and went through he calibration and acceptance, the computer was able to find the device just fine from the second welcome screen. Ugh!

But now it works, and I have spent a little time playing with it. I created pages of stars for some cards we were going to make in the CBL class, without wasting a bunch of paper (outside of the fact that I got more stars than I needed, so you'll probably see lots of cards with stars in the next bunch of posts. Good thing it's getting near to Fourth of July.)

My favorite thing though was changing the shape of the oval that came with the George and Basic Shapes cartridge. I got the Spellbinders Fancy Tags die cut set, and found that I didn't have an oval that would go inside the one tag. I was able to change the shape of the oval to match the tag (.85 inches wide by 1.75 high). Very cool! I will have to play with it more, but now that I got it set up, I love it!