It can cut out gazillions of hexagons or other shapes from fabric
Scan anything you can print from your computer or a photocopy or use one of the hundreds of inbuilt patterns
It’s also an effortless stencil cutting machine
Great for paper or stencil art
Get creative and paint your own paper
Enlarge your drawings with the press of a magic button
Some technical information about the Brother ScanNCut:
The ScanNCut has a 300 DPI built-in scanner which can scan virtually anything – a handmade drawing, a magazine clipping, photos, and more – to create virtually endless cut designs and save to the machine’s memory or to a USB stick.
No design cartridges or PC required and it has hundreds of built-in designs.
The large 3.7” (9.4cm) colour LCD touch screen has on-screen editing capabilities such as rotating, welding, resizing and organising.
It has 11.7” (29.5cm) wide scanning and cutting area to accommodate large projects. A longer 24” x 12” (30.5 x 61cm) mat is also available for large scale scanning.
Easy to use right out of the box with a limited set up time and user-friendly interface.
Comes with blades, mats, low-tack mats, stylus, spatula, pen set, erasable pen set.
ScanNCut machine product review
by Judy Newman
I’VE BEEN PLAYING WITH THE BROTHER ScanNCut MACHINE THIS WEEK. I HADN’T USED ONE BEFORE SO THOUGHT I’D SHARE MY IMPRESSIONS WITH YOU.
First of all let me say that once you try this machine, an overwhelming number of possibilities and ideas pop up for how it can be used – it was a real mind bender.
So let’s start with the basics. It is an electronic machine that can be used to cut out shapes from paper or fabric – and because it is electronic, it is effortless. Touch a button and it scans, cuts or draws.
Now back to the shapes for a minute – it comes with an inbuilt library of hundreds of shapes so you could be perfectly happy with that selection. They can all be resized, flipped to mirror image, and multiplied. Stacks of fun for any papercrafter and the first applications that come to mind are the obvious ones – cutting out your own frames, tags, embellishments and sentiments in any paper you like. Borders too – plus shapes like flowers, gift boxes and so on.
And if you’re a quilter, the prospect of being able to cut out a gazillion hexagons or other shapes from fabric or paper is exciting, but did you know that it can also draw and add seam allowance? So yes, it can cut out your shapes in fabric, but can also add seam allowance and draw (it has a little pen) the seam line onto the piece… now that’s cool.
To ensure you fit as many pieces as possible on a page, there’s a cool function that automatically arranges the pieces you want to cut as close as possible at the touch of a button, in order to minimise wastage. And if it’s fabric you are cutting, you can select to arrange the pieces but keep them all on the straight grain. Pretty impressive, huh?
But it’s when you consider that you can also scan in anything that you can print from your own computer or a photocopy that you realise you actually have access to a limitless supply of possible fonts, pictures and shapes.
Just pop the words ‘stencil images’ into Google and you’ll see that this is now an effortless stencil cutting machine and you have scads of possible patterns to stencil, print and cut out. Great for papercraft and textile art.
Now all that is fantastic, but we want creativity and originality, right? And this is where the fun starts because anything you scan in can become a cut-out design. Your own drawings, stamp carvings, print outs, block font messages, stamps. And of course you can change the size of the image and repeat it on the page. If you want to borrow my Living the Dream design,here is the pattern – of course you can cut it with a knife if you don’t have a ScanNCut machine (yet!).
Just as an example, you could paint your own paper in pretty watercolours brushed with a little metallic gold paint like I have done here, allow it to dry then cut out the motto. Tape a piece of gold card behind the cut out letters and frame it – nice huh? … happy with this one. 🙂
Just for fun, to test the drawing function I scanned in some of my son’s funky drawings, fitted the pen then enlarged the designs. Press the magic button, stand back and watch it work away redrawing his original art in pen. Imagine, if you wanted multiple ‘hand drawn’ images on invitations or cards you only have to do one and the machine can reproduce it over and over.
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I have loved trying this machine – it’s one of those times where the more you use it, the more ideas crop up for other things you could do with it. And I haven’t even tried it on fabric yet … or mentioned the new accessories packs that have just been released for stickers and rhinestone designs…. Hmm now what I could do with those… 🙂
Next time: we’ll explore what you can do with fabric, stay tuned!