Silhouette Cameo Review, and DIY Cell Phone Case Covers

I am sure you all know about the Silhouette Cameo by now. The awesome electronic cutting machine that can pretty much cut any shape you can possibly dream up onto vinyl, paper, cardstock, and so much more. Silhouette America is having their annual holiday sale starting TODAY, Thursday, November 28 thru Sunday, December 8!

Silhouette Cameo Sale

For a limited time only you can get the Silhouette Cameo or Portrait, bundled with other amazing Silhouette products for an incredible price! This is THE biggest promotion Silhouette has ever held, it includes:

A Silhouette CAMEO®, Silhouette Studio® Designer Edition Software, a dust cover (the color is decided by Silhouette), a $25 download card, a hook, a scraper, a spatula, and a pick-me-up® tool for $229.99. Retail price for all of this would total $406.93 (over 40% savings!)
A Silhouette Portrait®, Silhouette Studio® Designer Edition Software, a dust cover (the color is decided by Silhouette), a $25 download card, a hook, a scraper, a spatula, and a pick-me-up® tool for $129.99. Retail price for all of this would total $286.93 (over 40% savings!)
A Silhouette CAMEO®, a Silhouette Portrait®, and two $25 download cards for $299.99. That’s right: If you buy a Silhouette CAMEO® at full price, you get two $25 download cards and a Silhouette Portrait® ABSOLUTELY FREE! Retail price for all of this would be $406.93 (over 40% savings!)
40% off consumable products at silhouetteamerica.com. This excludes machines, subscriptions, download and gift cards. Cannot be combined with any other offers. Rain checks not available.
FREE SHIPPING on orders over $25.

Want to see more? To access the discounts, use the discount code RABBIT and click here!

See below for the review…

Silhouette Cameo Review

*Silhouette America sent me their Silhouette CAMEO to review as a part of this post and sale promotion. All opinions are 100% honest and my own.

I have eyeballed the Silhouette machines for some time now, and had yet to make the investment. Having seen them on other DIY blogs, it was clear that these electronic cutters could do some amazing things. So I was excited to get my hands on the Silhouette Cameo, and try it out for myself.

You all know my addiction to gold polka dots lately, so I decided to have some fun with it.

DIY Vinyl iPhone Case Stickers

Two of my favorite looks lately are gold polka dots and tribal prints. With Christmas around the corner, I thought some handmade iPhone cases would make a great holiday gift! You can pick up plain iPhone cases anywhere from $5 – $10, which is very reasonable.

The Silhouette Cameo comes with some pretty powerful software behind it. The cool thing is that they have it set up so that all you need to do is install the disc, plug in your Silhouette machine, and you are ready to go! If you are familiar with Illustrator or Photoshop, then you will have no problem working your way around the Silhouette Studio. It uses a lot of the same features for design creation. If you are a little less sure, the Silhouette machines come with an instructional DVD and booklet to help! The booklet points out every single button on the Studio software and tells you exactly what it is – and it is very easy to flip through and read how to cut out your very first Silhouette project.

I created a simple circle using their circle shape, and duplicated that same circle over and over again in a row. Once I had them all the desired size, I made sure the cutting feature was in place (it was already pre-determined to cut around the circle – so I didn’t need to worry about that). And loaded my gold vinyl onto the cutting mat!

It through me for a loop when I realized the machine was front loading. I kept trying to figure out how to insert the cutting mat through the back of the machine. HA! But the mat literally slides right up there after you click the ‘load cutting mat’ button.

And for all of you manual readers, stop laughing at me! Lol – I always try to figure everything out without reading any of the books. I only read as much as I need to. Which says something about this machine, as I really needed to read very little.

Once the mat with vinyl was loaded, I hit the ‘Send to Silhouette’ button in the Studio Software, and it walked me through the rest. I chose the proper paper setting (vinyl), and it indicated what I needed to set my cutting blade at and automatically set the cutting speed. (PS – do not throw away that funky little grey attachment that comes in the same packaging as your cutting blade! At first glace I thought it was simply a covering for the blade so no one got hurt during shipping. Turns out, it is the blade adjustment key.)

Once I adjusted my blade, I simply hit the ‘Cut’ button on the Studio Software and the machine did the rest!

Perfectly cut circles, better than anything I have ever tried to cut on my own. They literally peeled right off of the vinyl backing, and I just stuck them onto the iPhone case and was done!!! So so cool.

Want to know how I got the tribal design? After googling and finding a black and white tribal design image that I liked, one that would have nice clean cut lines and would be easy to play around with, I saved it to my computer.

I then followed this tutorial by Make-a-do for tracing and cutting your own images on Silhouette.

Since the tribal design was a little more complicated, I searched the Silhouette Pinterest page, and found the perfect cell phone case tutorial to help this Silhouette newbie get the proper dimensions and know how to making a design work with my iPhone case.

Once I had the design loaded how I wanted it, everything else was the same as the polka dots! Easy peasy.

The hardest part was choosing which iPhone case to keep, and which one to give away…lol! I may need to buy more iPhone cases.

Thanks so much to Silhouette America for sending me the Silhouette Cameo to review, I had so much fun with it!

And if you have ever considered purchasing a machine of your own, or have it on your wishlist this Christmas, be sure to take advantage of this sale. After all, everyone loves a great deal!

You can find all of the promotional bundles HERE, and be sure to use the Coupon Code: RABBIT. Offers are valid from now thru December 8, 2013.

Thanks so much for stopping by, and HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!