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Thanks. I've got lots of old leather. Probably won't need new leather for a bit. I want to do motifs and letters and maybe a sort of paint by numbers approach to a Van Gogh or Picasso or something...a different colour piece of leather for each different coloured area of the painting, IYSWIM. I'll paint the bits with Angelus leather paint then glue them to boots or jackets or whatever. I've bought a used Cameo 4 on ebay. Not collected it yet. No idea what to expect. I hope all will become clear when I start playing with it.
nick_h.
Bit tricky to follow, but did you want to cutup old leathers, or use new hides?
Light-ish weight new leather will be fine, although the sticky loading board might not remain effective for that long with the textured underside (boards are relatively cheap though). You can use specific heavyweight blades for thicker materials, or theres a rotary cutter wheel for textiles; the pathway is redefined for the rotary blade, think 'ice-skate lines' which might limit some designs.
If you use Adobe or similar, I found the Silhouette interface relatively straight-forward, and once you have the hang, it's a doddle. You can buy a plugin, Silhouette Connect, for something like $50 (3 licenses) to connect adobe directly and save some of the faff of saving as dxf and resizing in Silhouette Studio.
I've found a large part of the learning, has been working out 1) blade depth 2) pressure 3) time. The interface gives pre-loaded settings for materials, but you need to trial and tweak to find best settings.
I guess you're doing designs/lettering to then apply to a base? A handy technique might be to apply bondaweb/hot-melt film to the underside of the leather before cutting, then press on with an iron/heatpress before stitching on.
....good luck + let us know how you get on!