From cricut.com:

The Cricut personal electronic cutter is the future of home crafting. Simply by touching a button. Cricut can cut beautiful designs and alphabets for card making, scrapbooking, and paper crafting. No computer is required, just plug it in. Place your favorite cartridge in your Cricut and choose from over 250 designs in 12 different sizes; ranging from 1″ to 5-1/2″! That’s thousands of possibilities! Cutting customized shapes and alphabets has never been easier.

I got my Cricut as an early Christmas present this year, at the end of October. The machine came with a cutting mat, cutting blade, and the George and Basic Shapes cartridge. It was very simple to set up – take it out of the box, plug it in, add a cartridge, and you are ready to use it. Paper is placed onto the cutting mat (it is sticky and holds the paper in place), you select the shapes, sayings or letters you want cut, the size you want and press cut. The Cricut then goes to work, cutting what you’ve selected into the paper. A press of a button, the paper is ejected and you remove your shape from the cutting mat.

There is a bit of a learning curve with the Cricut, as with most new things. The cutting blade depth, cutting speed and pressure all need to be adjusted based on the type of paper you are using, but because of that you can cut anything from vellum to heavy cardstock.

The cartridge that come with the machine is a basic one to get you started, providing all letters of the alphabet, sayings such as “Thanks” and “Birthday Blessings”, as well as shapes such as flowers and stars. There are many options on the cartridge, allowing you to cut letters out on tags and much more.

Advantages of the Cricut are you can always get the shapes and letters to match your layouts, since you can use any paper that matches your theme. You are also not limited to a certain size of paper, you can set the machine to accept smaller sizes as well. The Cricut is fast, and the options are endless. There are 20 cartridges to choose from, including font cartridges as well as themed cartridges such as Animal Kingdom and Christmas cheer. You are also not limited to scrapbook layouts with this machine, you can use the Cricut to make handcrafted cards, wall hangings, and so much more. The messageboard at Cricut.com provides some very unique ideas for projects to be completed with your bug!

As with any product, there are some disadvantages of the Cricut. A major one is cost, the machine itself retails around $299, with each of the cartridges around $90. The accessories needed are also expensive, and I found that the blades and mats wear out quite quickly. I’ve also found my bug has frozen a couple of times in the middle of a cut, which is frustrating but not really an issue to me. It really is a simple computer, and I suppose it can get overloaded if you do too much too fast (I’m impatient, which probably doesn’t help).

All in all, I would rate the Cricut at 4.5 stars out of five. Its definitely a great investment if you are an avid scrapbooker, card maker or crafter in general!