HERE'S THE THING.......

With the Accuquilt machine and dies doing the rounds on lots of blogs, I decided that I really could use one especially with the hand problems I am developing lately with lots of cutting. I haven't managed to win one, so I saved up some money to buy one instead. It took a lot of research to find the dies at the cheapest price and to find cheap postage was close to impossible due to the weight of these dies.

Then it was time to price the machine itself. Wow!!!! Even when I found one at a reasonable price I was certainly not willing to part with the postage money. Then I had a thought, why couldn't I just use my Big Shot for the dies?

I googled and found my answer thanks to a couple of bloggers who had wondered the same thing. Yes I could use the Accuquilt dies in the Big Shot if I was willing to make an alteration to the dies. I thought about this and thought it was well worth the saving to alter the dies, it wasn't going to affect the performance of the dies so I gave the idea of buying the machine the shove, ordered my dies and patiently waited for them to arrive.

You see Accuquilt have been very sneaky in making their dies a 1/4" wider than Big Shot dies so you can't fit them into your Big Shot, therefore making you buy their machine for their dies. I wasn't buying that and when I received my dies yesterday, I took them around to my father in law and asked him to dock the dies. He said that his circular saw would be able to do that and they only took a few minutes each to do.

So now my dies are altered and I can go about cutting my fabric really quick and easily. I've been cutting 6 layers at a time, there's a little bit of waste but I will use that up in other projects and my hand is definately thanking me for it.

I can't wait to try out the rest of my dies and I've saved myself around $200 by thinking outside the square.