Question for Gypsy owners

[jfugina]

For those of you who have a Gypsy - do you take it with you a lot, or do you mostly keep it as a design tool near your Cricut? I ask because I'm having a lot of trouble using it without the books. Ideally, I'd have some master book of all of my cartridges that I could grab and take with me so that I could see what the cuts are for all the features. The little images on the screen don't always tell me enough. I have to actually put the image on the mat, and then increase it to a huge size to see what something looks like.

I know there's a learning curve, and I've had this thing all of two days (two short evenings, really), but what do you experts do? Do you just have design where your books are, or are you able to do what you need with just looking at the keypad on the G? I'm thinking of undertaking a major scanning projects of all of my cart books and re-printing and putting them in a binder I can keep with the G. But man that seems like a lot of work.

[gwendols]

Julie - I take mine to any crops I go to. You can enlarge the image by hitting the top of the two buttons (the semi-curved ones) and then hitting the image. I find that's the easiest way to see what I'm looking at. You can do this either on the keyboard screen or the mat screen.

The other thing that I've heard of people doing (if you have an iPhone) is to download the booklets for the cartridges and then using a reader app on your phone to view it.

Hope that helps!!!

[jfugina]

I'm wishing I had the G at work with me now. I knew you could enlarge the mat by holding the top curved button and tapping, but I didn't know you could do that with the keypad. THANKS! That is precisely the kind of tip I was looking for!

I don't have an iphone, or an i-anything for that matter. Though Rob just got an iPad on Friday and I don't think it's been more than 2 feet away from him since he got it. So I'll have to have him try that. Can you download the entire booklets from the cricut site? I've never seen that option.

Thanks Gwen! You rock.

[gwendols]

No problem!!! I've had mine since November and I love it!!! I was able to play with one at the October CS retreat (Joy had hers there). Once I played with it, I realized how cool this thing was. Before that, I really wasn't interested in getting one.

You can go to Cricut.com and get the manuals there. If you go under cartridges and select the one you are looking for, you can download a PDF version of it.

Of course - I've also found this feeds my urge to get more cartridges. Since you can see what is on any cartridge, I now have a Wish List and have been keeping an eye on when Joann's and Michael's have theirs on sale.

[jfugina]

Ah, I found them... finally. I had no idea that list was even there. This is great! I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a Sony Reader that I keep pretty close at hand, and it handles PDFs perfectly. I'm going to load those up tonight, and all of my problems will be solved. Well, except the problem of needing a larger purse, because the G won't fit in my current one.

Thanks again! I'd have been kicking myself if I'd spent any time scanning all of those books.