Sundays with Steph - A problem shared

Hello and welcome to my first Sundays with Steph blog post!

My first question of the day is what can be both big and little at the same time......

The answer is a PROBLEM!! 

Well you know the age old saying of a problem shared is a problem halved......... My plan is to share my newbie Silhouette problems with you, show you how I either resolved them with the help of the Silhouette Design Team or worked them out on my own. Therefore halving the problems and finally solving them!

So I obviously made Santa's good girl list this year. As I'm sure you can imagine my delight on Christmas day when I opened my present from my wonderful parents - my very own Silhouette Cameo!!! 

Due to the Christmas/New Year celebrations I couldn't get to play with my new toy for a while - sob sob. Finally the day of peace and quiet arrived, my husband went fishing for a couple of days, the girls where out seeing friends.....Time for the cameo to make its maiden voyage, yay! First problem, it had a European plug attachment! First solution, call my eldest daughter who was in town, explain the impending disaster that was currently happening and to earn super kid status she would need to drop everything and get a convertor plug, it was a matter of life and death! As Enrique once said "I can be your hero mummy" or something like that anyway??? And she was.

So once I had the plug, following all of the on-line instructions, smugly thinking to myself this is easy and I'm a natural (oh how wrong I could be). Choosing my first design I wanted to cut from my library, I double clicked it.....all looked good....loaded my design mat into the machine and hit send. 

It took my mat and my paper, made all the right noises (the machine isn't quiet so don't panic at all the clicks it makes!) but it didn't look like it was cutting?  Hmmm what's going on here?  I waited until it had finished, nothing!!! not a mark on my paper at all. Maybe I wasn't such a natural after all?? Looking at my set up again everything looked good as far as my novice eye could see....so what was wrong????  Turn it off and turn it back on again, that solves everything right? I tried again, still nothing!?! Aarrgghh! Up steps the second hero of the day, Niki Rowland.

I messaged Niki, explaining everything and any help would be very helpful as I couldn't see what I was doing wrong :/ She said the first thing to do was to check my blade was inserted correctly. I was adamant it was as the blue circle was showing to say it was locked in position.  Niki wisely asked me to send her a photo, so I did.

I am sure she was suppressing a (little) giggle when she said it was not in far enough - by about an inch!!!  I opened it, and pushed it in a little bit more (I was being a little too gentle as I didn't want to damage my new baby) So sent her another photo thinking again it's like totally in now!!

Hurrah success?!?  Hmmm maybe not just a little bit more she said.....

Yipeeeeeeeeeeee!!  All in!!  All is good in the world again (ok, I'm maybe a little over dramatic but I was happy!!) So I sent it to my Cameo and hey presto I now own my very own cut file!!  I celebrated by making myself a cuppa then I set to work creating my very first page layout with my very first cut file (I had cut myself) and here is the end result!

Well thank you very much for reading my post and I am very much looking forward to writing to you again next week!  Cheerio for now

Steph x