First card using Silhouette Portrait 2

I’d been waiting for the black friday sale to get a silhouette portrait 2. I sold my KNK Zing sometime back and this was my replacement for it. Zing was a great machine but much more powerful (and hence complex) than my needs. It was also quite big (like other 12” cutters). I leaned towards the Portrait 2 for a couple of reasons:

1. I really like the variety of designs in Silhouette Design Store. It gives you a lot of options.
2. I do not cut anything that’s greater than or equal to 12” on all sides. I can still cut anything greater than 8” in the portrait as long as the other side is less than 8”. That fits the bill for all my projects.
3. The smaller size and the light weight of Portrait swayed me towards it. Smaller size definitely helps in saving space. light weight was probably more of a feel good factor because it’s not like I carry it around.
4. It has the same cutting capabilities as the Cameo – including the bluetooth. I believe the stipple feature is only for Cameo but I don’t care much for it. No longer I wanted to buy a machine thinking “oh what if I needed that feature once in 2 years”. I wanted to buy for my common scenarios.
5. Love the auto-blade feature!

While the price wasn’t that much discounted ($160 vs $200 regular price), I did get $125 credit for Silhouette Design Store and 150 free designs.

Now going back to the card, I really like the clean cuts from the Portrait. For the font I used “bauhaus 93”. It’s one of the fonts that comes pre-installed on Windows. I got the stars from one of the free designs and the chevron background is this design in the store. The glitter paper is from DCWV Glitzy stack. Love that paper! It has glitter but not the kind that rubs off and the paper is very smooth. I used 65lb paper for the background.

Portrait cut settings:

• For DCWV Glitzy cardstock, I used the built-in “Cardstock, Glitter” setting.
• For the 65lb cardstock, I used the built-in “Cardstock, Plain” setting.