First Silhoutte Card!

Having a birthday just before Christmas (20th December) can be pretty annoying. You wait all year and don't buy anything, then all your gifts come at once. Not to mention that you can rarely plan a meal out or a get together because everyone is so busy around Christmas. The only benefit I can see is that you can club together birthday and Christmas funds from close family and get one big gift!
This year I decided to bite the bullet and get an electronic cutting system. I've been considering it for a while, and have watched many hours of demos on Create and Craft for various Cricut machines, but the cost of the cartridges has always put me off. My friend even had a Craft Robo for sale, but I was lured in by reviews for the Silhoutte SD...but then by the time I went to order it they'd stopped selling them. Doh. By this point I was pretty sure that was the type of machine I wanted, one which I had complete reign on design and print features, so I decided to go for the newer Silhoutte Portrait.
I was so excited to get it on my birthday, but the days before Christmas were crazy and I never got a chance to test drive it, but come boxing day I had chance to get it out and give it a go.
I had a card to make for my brother (he's the 27th Dec!) and wanted to try and do a CAS cut card.
I used my DSA software to design a simple cut which included his age and the sentiment and then imported it into the Silhouette software. The first cut didn't work properly as I don't think I had the right blade depth, and the second and third time didn't work either as my computer crashed half way through the cut (this laptop wants binning!) but fourth time I set it to double cut and it worked really well!! Yippee!!!
I'm really pleased with the result, and now I have the basic template I can adapt it quite easily.
This is why I wanted a Silhouette and not a Cricut, because deep down I don't want to just cut words and labels, I want to design and I'm excited about what I can create with this :)