 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to be unboxing the Gemini Jr. I don't usually do unboxings, but this one seemed like since I had a box and I had a camera, I just opened it and you could see what comes in the box. And thank you to Crafter's Companion for sharing one with me so I could share it with you. And here it is, lots of purple in this. The Gemini Jr. does embossing and die cutting, and I have not actually gone to get any of the die cutting machines that have come out in years. I have my very old, old, old, old hand crank that I've used for a decade or so, and it doesn't work all that well. That's one reason I don't do a lot of die cutting, but maybe that will change now. Who knows. I can finally get rid of that thing and kick it to the curb. So there's a clear cutting plate, two clear cutting plates. There's a rubber embossing mat, a metal cutting plate, which you use for fancy dies, the really detailed ones. A magnetic shim and a plastic shim. And you do sandwiches for different things just like you do with other die cutters. So let's look at the little crafty things they give you. They have one embossing folder and a set of dies, so you can play with it right away and I'm going to make something with those dies at the end of this video. But first I have to get the beast out and it is a bit of a beast. It's a little on the heavy side and there's a nice big, heavy cord that it comes with and just going to take everything out of its plastic bags as I go and put them safely away because I have doggies who love to eat plastic. So then take the rest of this off. Now the Gemini is on the heavy side and if you are someone who likes to carry it around with you, I would think carefully about it because it's a 10 pound machine and there's no handle on the top. So the places they put the handles, that little purple area that I just showed you, there's a handle on either side. It makes it a two handed carry and it's very easy to carry with two hands. It's 10 pounds. Think about a 10 pound baby. But it's not one where I'm going to be hauling it around all over the place. But here are the specs if you're looking for, is it going to fit in your craft room on a shelf that you have or something? Sometimes that information is helpful to have. So the plug goes in the back and there is an overall on off button right there. But then there's also one on top. Don't really know the difference between them, but you have to have the one in the back on or the one on the top won't work. So turn that puppy on and then get out the instructions because the instructions are important. I actually read them. I don't always read them. I often try to just see how easy is it to use it without reading the instructions. And look, they give you a notes page so you can take notes on things. I don't know why that that is. I'm not sure I've ever taken notes in one of the user guides for any product that I've had before, but there you go. And it explains all the different sandwiches, explains all the different buttons and stuff. And what I really wanted to see was, is this dummy proof? Is this something that even I can do because I'm not so smart at this kind of a thing? I color. That's my my shtick. And it actually is surprisingly easy. The pictures they have here are nice and they they show you exactly what to do. They come in French. And I think it was French, German, Spanish and Dutch. And yeah, so lots of different languages. If you live in other places, although if you live in other places, maybe you don't speak English and you have no idea what I'm saying, but there you go. They are very kind to you all over the world. They will share the directions in your language. So I'm going to try just my first cut. We're going to watch the first cut here on the video. You have the main plate on the bottom, then the plastic shim. And then you have to use the magnetic side, which is the shiny side of this one. And your little dies will stick to it and they're not that fuzzy. It's just my camera being weird at the moment, but just going to arrange them. And I just wanted to see how it cuts. I want to see how good or bad it is. And I'm just going to use some regular old 80 pound Nina just to see what happens. Then we have the metal cutting plate and the clear cutting plate. That's our sandwich. So turn the thing on the little buttons to light up. And if you can really see that very well, but they do light up. I waited for a second. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to start worrying or making noise or anything. And then you just feed it in, you don't push it, you don't force it. And it will grab it and start to pull it in. It's about 10 seconds for an impression to go through. So there we go. And I did have a little issue because the stand for my camera is right there. I did tip it to get it out. A little bit of a pain, but there you go. So let's see what happened. And this is one of the really super detailed dies. And in the instructions, it talks about how sometimes you do have to run it through a couple of times. So let's see what happens as we run it through and see the, the dings that are going to be in the metal plate. Don't worry about that. Just like you're going to have cuts in the clear plate, just like you normally would. And that's okay. It's just what happens to these machines because you need to have something to cut into. So run it through again here and see how that works. And get out of the back of the machine and knock things over and see how that did and that is definitely much, much better. But look at how beautiful it does all this detail. It's kind of crazy amazing. Look at that. Look at that. I'm really impressed. I have not been able to get my old machine to do anything with these pretty fancy dies. So that would be why you don't see them very much on my channel because I have to do so much shimming in the past. And maybe that will change now. Maybe, maybe that'd be kind of nice to be able to use something different and fancy like this. All those little pieces pull out beautifully. And though I wasn't really planning on making a card, I was just going to do some die cutting and embossing demos. I just decided I wanted to make a card out of that particular die set because it was really pretty. So I'll do that in just a few minutes. But before I do that, I want to show you the embossing because I haven't done embossing in a long time either. I haven't bought embossing folders in ages. And this is one that comes with it like I showed you at the beginning and you just put it sandwiched around your paper between the two clear plates and feed it on through. Now I want you to put down your drink. If you're drinking anything, just don't get scared because I got scared. So it's going to come through and whoop. I totally thought I broke something. I really did. But nothing was hurt. It was just getting to the end of the embossing folder. So look how gorgeous that is. Look how deep that embossing is. Isn't that pretty? So that was pretty cool. That was pretty impressive. So now I'm going to try making an actual card because, you know, this is my channel and we make cards here. So I'm going to set up the sandwich and I have my border, that beautiful border down at the bottom of the card and the sentiment love just in the middle. And I've taped them down with my washi tape and I'll set it up with the sandwich. And I want to try the back and forth thing this time just to see how that works. So I will feed it all through, bada-boom bada-bing. I love that you don't have to force it. It just pulls it on through and then it pause. And I wasn't sure if I needed to hit it twice or not, but it did pull it back in. So that was good. And again, we have the weird zoomie focus thing, bada-boom bada-bing. So now it went through twice without having to pull it out and then put it back in. And you can see there's a little spot there that might, you know, might want to be adjusted. So I'm going to run it through one more time to just see if I can get that to cut better. And that is hopefully going to work because I love the idea of using fancy dies. I just don't love the idea of not being able to function with them because I'm not as smart as the average bear when it comes to these kinds of things. I might be able to color up a storm, but I can't die cut or die darn. So I'm going to run it through a couple times just to see. And look how easy that is to start and stop over again and run it through. Turn it back the other way. And if you keep your Gemini up against a wall or close to a wall, this would allow you to get it back out without having to constantly be working against the wall on the other side to be kind of helpful. So it looks like it cut really nicely this time. So I'm pulling this off very carefully from the piece of paper, and it really did sandwich my washi tape down really well. So I'm going to pull it off at an angle. If you pull your wash tape straight up, you might pull little bits of the paper with you, but if you pull it at an angle, it'll tend to work a little bit better. And then just punch out all the little extra pieces to make a nice lacy border at the bottom of the front of the card. But I wanted to make the word love stand out. And since the word love has some loops in the letters, I had to figure out what to do with the loops in letters because otherwise it looked like they were vacant. So I cut one out of red so I could just tuck that one right back in the spot where the other one was die cut out. And with the scotch tape on the back of it, it's just going to stick right there in place. And I just press it down into the scotch tape and look how pretty that is and then take the empty pieces or the negative pieces that were in the the letters and pop them back in using my little quick stick pickup thing. And there we go. I put a panel of red on the inside of the card, rounded my corners a little bit and then on the top section where all that tape was, you just put a white panel over top of it so no one will see and it gives my card a little more sturdiness. So that was a pretty simple Valentine card made with the Gemini Junior. If you're interested in more information on it, there's a link in the doobly-doo to the Gemini over at Ellen Hudson. She's got a screaming deal on it. I looked around for prices and she definitely has an equal or lower price than lots of other places. So take a look at it and I will see you guys again next time. I have another video planned soon with the Gemini so we can see how that works.