I'm In LOVE!!!

I just had to share. I'm in LOVE... Most peop0le would think there's a guy involved. Sheesh - just give me art stuff...
Ok I mentioned last week I finally bought a Cricut Personal Cutting machine. And it works well with the one cartridge it came with. But I noticed a USB slot on the machine and started to google how to use it with my computer. Lots of info out there, but one that said you can download a free Vector program from Inkscapes which I did. Was playing with that for a bit. There will be a definite learning curve for that program.
But I also need to buy some software to download whatever I draw to my Cricut. Well I bought that yesterday evening from Craft Edge called Sure Cuts A Lot for $75.00 which was about $85 Canadian. (Michael's sells the Cricut computer program for $130.00, which I guess you can get a bit cheaper if you shop around, but I believe it's limited to access to only their cartridges). Tried it and it didn't work. Said I need to download firmware and stuff. I was tired and said "sheesh" and closed the machine.
Anyways, tried again this morning, and needless to say it worked. I was trying to cut using the "scissor" icon, so instead I used the drop down menu command and that worked. Forget about the firmware they were mentioning. My firmware was just fine on my machine.
OK so now I have all the True type fonts on my computer that I can cut including Dingbats and stuff. AND what's best is my machine would only cut 5.5" tall ovals (which were too narrow) from the "George & Basic Shapes" cartridge I had because I couldn't flip it. Now I can cut ovals that are 5.5"w and humungously tall. YES!!
I was also melding my letters (makes letters closer together for a more united word)
Then I said, now if only I could cut my calligraphic letters. So I did a large Italic "a", scanned it and opened it up in my vector program, saved it and imported it into my Sure Cuts A Lot program and cut. I can't believe I'm able to do that. BIG BIG GRIN
Ok I erased a few lines when I scanned it and the Cricut cut my thickness of lines instead of the outer and inner portions of the letter. So I need to work on figuring out how to only cut what I want. I'm not very savy on vector programs yet. Give me time. But it did cut it and it was recognizable if not perfect.
There might be some interference with my Adobe Photo Deluxe scanning program and the Sure Cuts A Lot program, because when both were open, I couldn't scan. So had to close down my machine, scan and then open the other program. Hey so I can live with a bit of conflict, which might not be there all the time. Will see if that problem persists.
Forgot to mention, the software overrides the commands on the Cricut machine. So even though you might say on you machine to cut a 2" letter, whatever the size letter is on your "mat" in the software program is what's going to be cut, as well as the position of where it is on your mat.