Brother Scan N Cut and Why I love it!

If you have never heard of the Brother Scan N Cut you will now! I love this thing! It is a multi-medium stand alone cutting system. One thing about me is that I hate hand sewing, well that's not really true Hand Sewing Hates Me! Applique, Embroidery, English Paper Piecing, and Binding are techniques I wish I could explore fully and increase my skills but Carpal Tunnel and my general klutziness has made holding small needles painful at times! When we started being a Brother Sewing Machine Dealer at my mom's quilt shop, JoyQuilts Website,  it was just as they were introducing the Brother Scan N Cut. I fell in love with this machine. Years before I wanted to be a scrapbooker, but never made it past getting supplies. I looked at other cutting machines over that time couldn't justify the price of the machine and the shapes for cutting. With this awesome thing it has a built in scanner and can cut whatever size, shape, or pattern I can scan!

We started a Scan N Cut Club at the store about 6 months ago to get the ladies who purchased them using it! Most still had them in the box and what little cutting they had done with it was problematic. They didn't know what settings to use or anything. There are so many great blogs or youtube channels for tutorials on the amazing things this machine can do!

We have cut several different mediums and made several projects with our Scan N Cut but my favorite so far has been our block of the month. The machine has 114 pieced blocks and 60 applique blocks. One of the things I also love about this is that it will draw on your 1/4 seam allowance, keeps me accurate. To make our block of the month with our Scan N Cut I chose 4 blocks that were in the machine. I changed the size of the blocks off set them and used lots of negative space and intense quilting.

This is a mini quilt. It finished at 24 inches on all sides. I used the solids from Kona. They were from the QuiltCon 2015 Charity Quilt Challenge Fabrics. 

This was the first block we made for this Quilt and the inspiration for the quilts name! We made four of these blocks and they were placed in the corners.

 Block 2 was a little more complicated because I changed a few of the colour choices from the what the Scan N Cut suggested.

We are cutting this block out this month on our Friday Club Night. The tiny pieces have some of the ladies so NO NO NO. But I reminded them that the seams are drawn on and the machine is cutting them not us!

Our Fourth block will be cut in July and we will also be cutting the extra white to off set the blocks in the right order. I really love how the sharp contrast of the background white shows the piecing.

I darkened this photo using Pic Monkey to highlight the quilting. I haven't really used photo editing software before this week. I wanted this photo to show the intense quilting I used on this Mini Quilt. I pieced this project with aurifil 50wt white thread, Kona Cotton Fabric, Hobbs 80/20 batting, and quilted with Mettler Polysheen colour 15, my Bernina 770 with the BSR!

So if you haven't tried the Brother Scan N Cut try it out! Post again soon!