i let a robot do the part of my job i never liked

There is a machine the size of a loaf of bread on my shelf that has cut forty spice labels, one tiny paper corgi, a holographic decal for my water bottle, and a single word in iron-on vinyl that I will describe later, when I am ready.

I studied print design. I spent two years of art school hunched over a cutting mat with an X-Acto blade, and I have opinions about this machine that go all the way down.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part: buying a cutting robot felt like a small betrayal of my own two hands, which is dramatic, but I was trained by people who hand-cut rubylith, so the drama is inherited. Then I watched it cut a perfect four-inch script word out of vinyl in ninety seconds with zero blade cleanup, and I made a sound neither dog enjoyed.

what it actually does, a list

Setup is a five minute affair. Plug it in, pair it over Bluetooth, load a design, go. No manual, no alignment ritual, no obscure tutorial. I set up complicated gadgets for a living and this is the fastest out-of-box experience I have tested on this blog.

It's small in a way that changes how you use it. About the size of a bread loaf, five-ish pounds, and it lives on my bookshelf between a candle and the camera bag. The tradeoff is the cut width: 4.5 inches, max. You can get around it with long smart vinyl and clever layout, but if your dream is cutting a 24-inch poster, this is the wrong machine and the reviews that frustrate people usually forget to say that part loudly enough.

Smart materials load without a mat. You feed the vinyl straight into the machine and its stiff backing acts as the mat, which removes the entire fiddliest step of die-cutting. And because it's a roll, the Joy can cut one long continuous design up to 20 feet. I have no use for a 20-foot banner. I am delighted it can.

It writes too, and this is the feature for me. Swap the blade for a pen in the same clamp and it draws in your chosen font with a real pen tip. My handwriting is legible in the way a panic scrawl is legible, and now every jar in my pantry says what it is in a clean sans serif of my choosing. The oats jar lied about being flour for two days. My fault, not the robot's.

The subscription tax is real and you should budget for your relationship with it. Design Space, the software, is free. But the good project library sits behind Cricut Access, which runs about ten dollars a month, and nearly every experienced crafter will tell you the same thing: the free designs are fine and the paid library is where the fun lives. What I did, not advice: I pay month to month and cancel between projects. You can also buy individual designs for about a dollar each, which is honestly a nice compromise.

There's a waste strip and it hurt my heart. The machine wants about an inch of clear space above and below your design, so you lose a margin of material on every cut. Professional reviewers call this a faff to work around, and I call it a personal insult, and both of us are right. I save every scrap of vinyl like a raccoon now.

Weeding is the part nobody warns you about, in a good way. After a cut, you pick the negative space out of the vinyl with a little hook tool called a weeder, and it is the most meditative forty seconds of my week. This is also where I tell you it is completely normal to ruin your first three decals. Your hands are fine. The material is just smug.

tangent: the machine that does my old job

In college I ran the letterpress studio on Thursdays, which meant setting type by hand, inking a 200-pound press, and cutting paper to size with a giant manual cutter that scared everyone appropriately. My career since has been a long walk from ink to pixels, and I thought that door was closed. Then this little beige robot started doing the precise hand-cutting part of my old job on my shelf, while I sat in a chair, and something in my chest got complicated about it. The craft didn't die. It got a smaller, quieter descendant. I'm still processing, and meanwhile my pantry is immaculate.

Anyway, moving on before this becomes my memoir chapter three, which has been requested and denied.

the soft landing

The word on the tote bag is "awesome," and on my first attempt it came out pressed backwards, reading in glorious mirror-script, because iron-on vinyl has to be mirrored before cutting and nobody tells you until they have told you. I kept that one. It's on the inside of my closet door where only I can read it.

I keep meaning to try the foil transfer kit for holiday cards, and I keep getting distracted by labels, which tells you exactly who I am.

Cut something. Label something. The scraps pile is a lifestyle.

• ava ✂️