eCraft: Cutting Stampin' Up! Paper on the eCraft

Day 2 with the eCraft and already finding some success.  My goal for today was to cleanly cut Stampin'
Up! paper on my eCraft as I have a lot of birthday party decorations to get to.  The problem I discovered yesterday was that the paper was shifting as it was cutting the paper so my image was warped.  I sped read through the Craftwell Tips & Tricks and thought that the blade depth was an issue.

Blade Depth Setting

On the blade box (or trolley), there is a Blade Depth Setting. I changed it to 6 to see if that would make a difference.  It did not. My paper still was moving around towards the top of the page.  My next thought that it was an issue as to where the cut was placed on the paper since the closer part of the cut was correct and the back end, closer to the top of the paper, was not.  I moved the cut on the MTC mat about an inch down and SUCCESS! I was able to cut my first complete piece from MTC to my eCraft.

Top) Failure on cut because blade was not deep enough
Left) Cut not correct on piece closer to the top left of the paper
Right) First perfect cut!

Now that I had completed my first cut, I was able to fully understand what the "tab" means when described by Craftwell.

You can see the little tab here in the picture above. The cut stays in the paper because of these tabs and you have to pop out the cut similar to popping out paper dolls from a book (if you have ever had to do such a thing).  They are not an issue at all and if you find you don't like the tabs, you can just zing a buffer on the tab and it will be gone in a jiff.

So far so good! I did come up with a tip in MTC that I thought I would share.  I am cutting with 8 1/2x11 sized paper. On my mat in MTC, I decided to create a rectangle that I would use as a base for where to place my cuts.

Since I found that the cut needs to be based to the bottom of the paper to allow the paper to move back and forth in the rollers, I used this rectangle that I placed on a layer that I hid just before cutting to place my three masks that I then cut out.  I also changed the orientation of my mat to be on Portrait which can be found on the Virtual Mat window.

Changing it to portrait rotates the mat 90 degrees so you can work with the mat in the same orientation that you are cutting it (unlike the Cricut). Yet another bonus.  My first reaction is that the cut is not as smooth as it would have come out with the Cricut but I am sure I can learn some tricks on how to fix that.

Two more comments: 

1) The noise. It is a different noise than the Cricut.  Just as noisy but different. I was very used to the hum of the Cricut that I just have to get used to the noise of the eCraft. It makes a clicking noise when it starts and stops the blade (to make the tabs) that is an additional noise.  

2) Possible paper waste?: since the paper needs a part on the top to allow the rollers to grab onto, there does appear to be some paper waste.  On the Cricut mat, I could cut fairly close to the edge and could get good use out of a 12x12 paper. I am hoping to find a resolution to this problem as well.

Anyway, I have a fair amount of things that I have to cut moving forward so I am sure I am going to learn a lot in the coming weeks.