I discovered that PC made pens for their cutter and bought a package.  I'm sure there's a way to fudge around the pen issues, but for now it will work.

I have tried to work with the Cougar cutter but right now it's overwhelming.  I had tried using a pen (it comes with a simple pen holder that only holds the test pen) but trying to put pieces on a mat designed for the Cricut is confusing.  The Cricut wins for now as it's simpler and much lighter to set up and put a way.

Erin's "My Tweets" whole block file must have disappeared from her blog when I went to download it via XP.  I may have to transfer the one I have on my Mac.  I know she was having measurement issues so she may have taken it down.

I imported the left bottom half of the pattern to Make The Cut and start working on the pieces.  After three weeks I'm sort of making my way through the program and understanding how it works.  I finally get what I want, put the pen in the Cricut machine and press the cut icon.

The machine starts throwing fits and spits out the mat and doing wacky things.  Great.  I probably just broke the stupid machine.  After a couple of attempts I realize (DUH) that the software is set for the Cougar.

After getting the right cutter set up, I got this:

Pretty cool!  I figure I could do this on fusible webbing making this so much easier except I had two problems.  The pen is too wide and for some reason not all the pieces came out the same size.  The two bottom leaves are so much bigger.  The rest of the pieces would fit much better if the pen had a thinner line.  But it works and it didn't take me all day to get this far.

Yeah.  I know.  Just tape the four pieces together and trace onto fusible webbing and forget the whole computer part of it.  The manic in me just won't let me give up with this idea.  Now to figure out how to fudge the pen issue.

Checking out Google and then will head to bed.  *Edited*.  After doing a search, I found that a guy has been cutting out out circuits with his Cricut.  That guy rocks admitting he even uses one.  If yours goes missing, check out your DH's man cave first to see if he's tinkered with it.  That guy needs to tell PC to make circuit cartridges and demand that PC stop suing 3rd party software so he can do his job.

I know alot of people are upset at ProvoCraft for their decisions but I'm beginning to really like my Expression.