Making sure that your mats are stored as flat as possible is very important. The quality of your cuts depends a great deal on the quality of your mats. The Inspiration was designed to load the mat with ease and lines up perfectly when it’s loaded into your Inspiration. This is one of my favorite features of the Inspiration!
I was finishing up a project and noticed that my mat was becoming misaligned, so all of my cuts were off. What should I do?
Lisa F. Paris, DE
This was a great question to address this week because I too experienced some difficulty when using a new mat last week. You will want to make sure that your mat is flat and loaded into the guide lines of your Inspiration platform properly to ensure the best cuts possible. Here in the office we actually store ours hanging up on our walls. The nice thing about doing it this way is that nothing is placed on top of the mats so that they are never bent or creased. I had a new mat that was just slightly curled at the tip because of how I had stored it. When I was cutting my project the mat was hitting up against the top of the cutter as the mat was moving in and out of the machine. As a result my Inspiration made a funny sound as I cut and all of my cuts were misaligned. Once I took out the mat and replaced it with a flat one my cuts were perfect. It’s important to check that your mats are flat before using them so that they aren’t rubbing and hitting against something that will ruin your project. If you have a mat that has become curled or bent for some reason, try laying it flat and placing a book on top of it to help straighten it out again.
Thank you for the info… I was just reorganizing my craft room and wondered if I could just hang the mats up vs laying them flat …lol…Thank you again!
When I first bought my Inspiration, the mat was packed in the box with the machine. I took the mat out of the box and it was definitely not flat. I had to put the new mat under the large cutting mat on my work table for a few days while I was familiarizing myself reading about my new machine. Because I was anxious to use my new machine, I did use that other company’s mat for my first cuts. After a few days, I went to use the Pazzles new mat, it was flat enough to use with no problems.