My Gypsy is here!!

I am really excited because I have recently upgraded to the Cricut Expression and I got a Gypsy on black friday!!  It came in the mail yesterday and I have been busy updating and getting it all ready to rock and roll!!  I feel like I outgrew my Babybug and wanted the bigger machine and also now that I have 25+ cartridges it was time to get rid of my Jukeboxes and move up  to the Gypsy!  I’m happy to report that I already sold one of my Jukeboxes to a friend of my sister’s and I have to figure out about the other one, I know one of my Scrappin’ sisters on my Yuku board is interested in it so I will have to decide soon.

 

Here she is in all her glory!!  I am so excited!!

   The first thing you have to do is Sync and update it with the software that you download from the Provocraft website.  I have to say that this was a bit of a hassle on my laptop and I even called the Geek Squad at Best Buy because I have Trend Micro installed that was free for a year when I bought it and on the PC website it says that there is an issue with Trend Micro and that you have to tell it to list CricutSync in the expections or whatever.  I got a really nice tech on the phone and we were laughing after a while and I told him that if his wife were a scrapbooker he would be able to go home and impress her, he said, “Never mind that, I think this company just got a new customer, this stuff looks fun!!”  Finally we realized that it had nothing to do with the anti virus software and I thanked him and said that I was going to call Provocraft to figure out why this thing was sitting at the sync window forever and not doing anything!  But…for shits and giggles I decided to download the software on my Asus Netbook that Jim got me for Christmas last year so that I would have something lightweight to take with me whenever I travel to my sister’s by bus and lo and behold the damn thing worked and I was able to sync and update my Gypsy!!  I can’t explain why but I am happy that it worked, that’s for sure!!! 

 

  

 

   The next step was to update your actual Cricut machine and that wasn’t a problem at all, you just plug your Gypsy into the Cricut and voila!!

My Gypsy came with 2 cartridges already preloaded and when you register it by December 31st you get 5 more free cartridges and one of them is “Christmas” so I thought I would just play and see what I could do right off the bat without any real instructions!  How awesome is this ornament die cut?  I love it!!!  And I love the negative space (the stuff that came out of the middle of the ornament because I can use it on another page since it looks like a pretty flower!!!

    

The next thing to do is to simply plug all of your cartridges in one by one and link them to your Gypsy and here you can see I did my Baseball one and it is all ready to go!  I did about half of my cartridges last night and will finish the rest tonight.  I wasn’t able to link the George and Basic Shapes cartridge and reading on the FAQ’s page on the PC website I saw that there is a problem with that cartridge since it is so old so I called customer service today and they are sending me a new “George and Basic Shapes” cartridge that I will be able to link to my Gypsy once I get it.  Now I can just simply get rid of that old cartridge and sell it along with my original baby bug…it served me well for 4 years and I am happy to pass it along to the next crafter who wants it.  Now it is on to bigger and better projects for me and I cannot wait to see what I can create with all of my new tools that I was able to get on Black friday this year!!  Happy Crafting, everyone!