The fateful time is at hand

...I finally made something on my Gazelle. Seriously, I have been terrified of it for weeks, probably as a result of the trauma of the fire in the laptop. But I saw Ashley and Jack (Ally's sister and nephew) last week, and we were in the craft store, and he wanted some vinyl stickies to go on his wall, and all they had were princesses, so Ashley said "I bet Juju would make you some dinosaurs if you asked really nicely," and then he did, so obviously I had to make them.

So we bought some vinyl (which was unconscionably expensive - $9 for a 12"x24" piece), and I started attempting to make him some dinosaurs using clip art from the internet.

And wow, did that ever involve more cursing than I would have anticipated. First the drivers wouldn't install. Then my computer wouldn't recognize the USB port that the authentication key thingy was attached to. Then, for whatever reason, the auto-vectorization program got all crazy and did every line as a dotted line. Then it went even crazier, and went over every line three times, ever so slightly off register with the previous lines.

Fortunately, I was practicing these on paper, because otherwise by this time the hideously expensive vinyl would have been gone.

I finally, finally managed to get them done, and popped them in the mail. I hope he likes them - it was a true struggle to get them accomplished. Hopefully I've figured out most of the kinks and it'll be smoother sailing from now on.