Cutterpillar- Glow Light Board - SPONSORED SHOWCASE

The Caterpillar light board, which is so fabulous, but Emily, you had a chance to work with this, so why don't you tell us some something about it? This is one of those things where you're like, I did not even know I needed this until I saw it in action and I played with it a little bit and I'm telling you this is probably, I'm not just saying this, probably one of my more favorite tools that I've gotten my hands on that you're like, this is so cool because I'll talk way more about this in the video and show you kind of a project from start to finish when we roll the video but the basic overview of it. Is this it's not just a light board. It has the ability to be a light board, a cutting surface, an ironing surface, and if you're not just a crafter with um fabrics, it can be something that's used for just lighting, um, paper, paint, cutting in any realm. It's not just a like a sewing realm with fabric so I'm wildly excited for you to see this demo because I got it in the mail and I played with it and you're like, OK, this is really cool.

It is even cooler to use because it's one of those like the features. are endless. You can use it in multiple different ways. The surfaces that they offer from the tempered glass to this kind of healing matte cutting surface is just like, oh, I can use it for that. Oh I can use it for paper.

Oh I can use it for fabric, or I can use it for denim or I can use it for thicker materials. I can use it. I used felt about 100% wool felt and 50/50 and 70/30 wool felt in the video that you're gonna see. So why don't we watch that quickly and then we can come back and talk more about the features because I'm sure I could just go on and on, but let's watch the video quickly first. I have a new product that I'm so excited to share with you.

It's called the Caterpillar Glow Premium 2 light board, and it will illuminate your craft projects, make things super easy to do, and show you how to intricately cut everything to make this project come to life. Your Caterpillar light board comes with this glow bag, which I love because it makes portable crafting so much easier with your light board. It comes with a great handle. It comes with lots of pockets and things on the outside. It's thoroughly padded, so you don't have to worry about breaking anything as you're putting all of your supplies in your car for your craft weekend or your girl's weekend away or any traveling that needed to do and there's also space for all of your extra add-on mats that you may have or glass surfaces, which you may have, which I will show you how to use and I absolutely love how slim and portable the design of this is because let me show you, it has up to 4 hours of battery life on the lithium ion battery, which means that you're not tied to a wall or a plug-in.

I love that feature because that just makes crafting a heck of a lot easier and there's 4 different brightnesses which is so cool when you touch the the Caterpillar Pro on. There is a different brightness setting for whatever fabric you're gonna use. And then the other cool thing is is that there is a tempered glass add-on. This glass. You lay right on top, and this tempered glass is 10 times stronger than regular glass, which makes it, get this, that I can iron right on the surface.

I'll take my iron. And I'm gonna flip it over and I'm iron right on the surface. It's recommended that you don't keep your iron on the glass surface for probably more than about 30 seconds, but I'm gonna tell you you don't need it any longer than that because the only thing that you kind of have to think about is making sure that it doesn't this glass piece doesn't get too hot, but I mean it does not get hot at all. I'm not using any steam. I'm just using the heat setting on my little mini iron here, which is the perfect addition to this this light board.

So, OK, this is enough for this little flower and now I'm just gonna kind of continuously work by kind of guessing how much fabric I need, which is maximizing not putting too much interfacing on the back of different fabric types because I've had that issue before where you're kind of wasting fabric and wasting interfacing, but this cuts that down and makes everything a little bit more um useful and and easy to lay out. And how cool that I'm able just to iron right on the surface. The other thing I noticed about this tempered glass surface is this sometimes interfacing, um, has, you know, the, the gluey kind of part melts, um, a little bit because if you see, you can kind of see that I have uh a part of my interfacing that overlaps. This glass. Surface is so cleanable.

I, what I can't just kind of like wipe off with a damp rag. I can easily just grab a razor blade and just kind of easily razor off. So any glues, you can even use paint on here if you're wanting to transfer, if you were wanting to make like this specific pattern into. I canvassed a frame or something um I it it's because it's a glass surface it is so washable wipeable and and cleanable that I don't think that there's much to really worry about with this glass surface. You can kind of do a lot on it and I think ironing is one of those amazing things.

OK, so I have this section. And there's another section, so I'll do these two in blue and then maybe a couple more small ones which are the same size as this leaf right here. So I can kind of measure and go, OK, this leaf is here. And there's also the other thing I should note too as I'm measuring, it might feel like I'm kind of guessing, but I'm actually not guessing as much as you think because on the tempered glass um mat right here, there's um the grid. And so I'm able to kind of see, OK, this is 1 inch wide by kind of 2 inches with a curvy line, so I'm able to kind of measure a little bit more maybe than it seems like I am.

Um, because of the grid that's on here, which is also really helpful. This is almost like one of those work surfaces that's everything all in one. No more ironing that needed, no we're pressing that, no more cutting surface because I'm gonna show you how we're able to cut also right on the light board, so cool. And then you make it really more successful because we'll be able to lay everything out perfectly. One other thing to note too as I'm I'm thinking of this, I am using a 100% wool wool felt, um, actually two of the colors I believe are a wool polyester blend, like the 80/20 uh wool polyester blend because the heat from.

This iron could potentially melt full polyester wool, or excuse me, full polyester felt. So this is, most of them are all wool. This pink right here, I know, is the 80/20 blend and so is this purple. And it's not melting at all. It's great.

It's an awesome. I love it. I love felt. I use a lot of felt because it's very tactile, and I feel like the colors are vibrant and beautiful. OK, so now that all of my fabric has my interfacing on it, I'm gonna move the fabric off to the side, take my tempered glass piece off, and now just use it as a traditional light board, which in other cases I would have had to walk my my pieces over to the window and hold it up or.

Somehow concoct a flashlight situation, but this makes it so easy. So the one thing I I'm gonna do, which is not typical, but I'm gonna do this just because I have really thick felt and some of it is full wool felt, so it's really thick. I'm gonna pre peel off my paper backing. Sometimes people don't like to do this because when you have this extra paper backing. Interfacing if you're using something lighter weight like linen or normal cotton, the paper backing gives sturdiness to your interfacing, so when you're ironing and you're cutting, you get a lot more precise, um, sort of cuts and corners because it's just kind of a lot more sturdy.

With the felt it's not necessary, and I'm going to remove this bulk so I easily can see here, let me show you, um, with all of these options. I easily can see my lettering underneath uh. This is where having fingernails works, so I easily can see look it where I can see my flowers and my lettering underneath um where I want to trace. So now is kind of the super fun part where I have all of my fabrics ready to go and I'm just gonna use this as a traditional light board laying everything out but again. The cool thing in all of this is that I'm able to maximize my fabric space by moving things over and up and around so that each one of the colors that I've cut I can get as many flowers or circles or um leaves out of it as possible um when I'm laying it all out.

So I'm gonna trace with my marker and then we'll get to cutting after that. OK, now that I've finished tracing out my leaves and all of my flowers, maximizing my ironed interfacing felt where I'm able to get all my flowers on here in the exact position that I want to. Now I'm going to do the same thing with my larger piece of fabric for all of the letters in the center of my graphic here. I'll just use my marker and trace it, and then we'll move on to our next step of cutting. So now that everything is traced my flowers and my lettering, I'm gonna grab my dual grip self-healing cutting mat.

This thing is amazing because it covers the entire work surface, this 13 by 19 work surface of our light board and I'm able to cut directly on it. It's. A little bit textured so it'll grip the fabric so nicely. I'm gonna keep my light board on because I want to see really clearly where these lines are at because I don't know about you, sometimes when you're cutting, you're trying to see these intric pieces, having this extra light is kind of a big deal. I feel like for cutting things like this.

I'm gonna use both scissors and my rotary. And for cutting out these curves, this grippy texture is gonna be key. I tested it a little bit ago and I'm so excited about it because the felt itself has a little bit of kind of tooth to it and then the grippy part of this mat is making it even more amazing and slip resistant to cut on where I'm able to cut out these little pieces, toss them aside. This makes it so easy. Now that I have all my letters cut out, I'm gonna move my cutting mat to the side, bring my pattern back onto the light board and my background canvas fabric and look it, it's now going to illuminate the exact composition.

That of where I want my letters to be, so there's no guessing and how I'm gonna place everything. There's no guessing in how this all has to be laid out. There's no guessing in the shapes of the sizes because it's all right here already cut, already centered, already laid out, so that all we have to do is transfer our pieces to get them exactly where we want them to be from what we've cut. OK, so my flowers are laid out, which looks really good. Now I'm onto my lettering.

OK, now that all my letters are on here. I'm gonna line everything up. I probably could adjust this all till it's just perfect forever and ever. Amen. But uh what I'm gonna do is slowly and carefully slide off my canvas.

Leaving my light board on because I still want that glowy, amazing, easy to see surface underneath and leaving my pattern there, but I'm gonna add my tempered glass back on top. I'm still able to see my pattern through it. But this tempered glass surface remember is what gives us the ability to use our iron to iron and fuse together our felt to my canvas because there's that layer of interfacing. So since our tempered glass is underneath, I'm just going to slowly with my little iron start gently pressing and remember pressing is leaving the iron on for a few seconds. It's not the ironing back and forth that you do.

When you're ironing clothing and I have no steam on, um, because that's just not necessary for a project like this, I'm just gonna start setting everything in place so that that interfacing that's between the layers of my felt and my canvas gets nice and melty and acts like glue so that it all sticks together. And then our last step after this is to put it in a frame and see how it all looks. So this is how everything turned out, and I think it turned out so beautiful. I loved how easy everything was to cut, how easy it was to lay out with this beautifully lit lit surface. It was shining brightly, so I was able to lay everything out, cut everything precisely, and it turned out just wonderful.

The Caterpillar Glow Premium 2 light board is something that I'm thrilled to have in my studio, and I hope today inspired you to go check out the product and make one of these beautiful boards yourself. What a cool product. I'm so jealous that you got to work with this, to be honest with you, and like you said, it's one of those things that you might not think about having in your sewing room, but there have definitely been times when I've been taping stuff onto my window we've all been there for something small or large and you're moving it around the whole trying to hold it up to the windows at the same time, kind of a disaster, yeah, I was, I was. Massively impressed, um, I, I, in, in full transparency, I have a light bar at home that's from college and it's this thick chunky giant kind of clunky thing that uses batteries or if you don't have the batteries because I never have the batteries that has a cord about this so for no other reason than the like for for no other feature, the fact that this is so thin, like so thin, it's thinner than like a tablet which I am so impressed with it's really lightweight and the fact. That you can charge it and it actually stays charged with how bright that surface is is I think so cool and then add on all these different mats you can put on it for the different features it's like chefs get and how amazing it is yes, and these are a whole other thing that I wanna talk about but just this being easy to move around because like you said outlets are never conveniently placed for plugging things in so to have that cord free be able to move it around.

It's thin it is lightweight and it does so much, you know, it's so much more than just a lighted surface. You've got your your cutting surface, the gritted cutting surface and. Your ironing surface so instead of having, you know, your cutting mat and your ironing mat and your light board and your iron and whatever else your sewing machine, it's just it's all right here and you can move from one step to the next again we're making things easier for ourselves in our sewing room and I just love that. The other thing that I noticed too about the tempered glass surface is that if you're not just a fabric person, if you are a painter or if you're a drawer or if you have kids that like to draw or paint or even if you're doing like diamond art or other sort of things that are kind of a little bit meticulous, this surface, this tempered glass surface, this one right here which is the clear glass that has the feet on it. This is the surface that I think makes this a complete game changer because this is the surface that I ironed out in the video but also with a simple wipe of a um uh cloth or even like a razor blade if you're using oil paints you can clean the surface with almost anything that you use.

So even if it's glues and you're doing like a a a paper piecing thing together like this is so cool because I maybe it's just because I'm older and have bad eyes. I don't know, but any time. Like maybe amen if you agree but when you're lighting a surface and you're using something intricate, it just like it makes it so much easier. So not only is this convenient for the tracing piece of things and all of like that actual crafting um handiness, this is one of those honestly one of those products that you're like, yep I'll use that for this and that and this and for painting and for tracing or for paper products and I mean I just made these like. Little, I don't even know what they were like um locker tag things for my son's baseball thing and they, of course I did this design with this intricate little lacing and this makes it like literally a line of glue and even if you get glue on the thing you can wipe it off later, stick it on there and bad bing bad boom and you're off.

So I think it's just like it is truthfully one of those products. It's super cool. Yeah, good lighting is a must for everything and yeah, and once you get it in your sewing room, it's like you'll you'll. Find even more uses for it like I was telling Emily during the break reverse applique you know normally I'm printing my template I'm cutting it out. I'm putting it on my fabric I'm tracing around it and then I get to move to the next step, but with this you can put your template on, put your fabric on and just trace it and it eliminates so many steps which I love.

So we do have some questions. uh, what are the dimensions of the lighted area? So you can see kind of that's a good question because you can see the board itself is a little bit bigger. I don't know if you can see this the board itself is bigger just because it has a touch screen, um, button right over here. But the actual dimensions of the lighted area, which is the same dimensions as the tempered glass surface is uh 12 by 16, so big area, super big, and the cool thing is is every one of the the um extras of the tempered glass surface or the cutting surface also has all of the gritted marks.

It has angled marks. It has half inch marks. It has centimeters and inches, so metric and um all the different. I don't know, measurements you want 45 degree angle, 70 degree angle, 30 degree angle, all the things that you would want, and I think that's also great, yeah, and it has, you know, not only your inch marks, but it's got half inch lines, it's got quarter inch lines all the way across for both of these surfaces. I do have to say this is what I love about being part of a community.

I, I poked over at the comments over here and Larissa said I always trace on my heat and bond and then I earned it onto my fabric. I think you just blew my mind. This is why being a part of a crafty community is amazing because she said that and I'm going, Oh my gosh, yeah, why didn't I think it makes sense? But either way, I guess you can light, you can light craft the crafty bond, the heat and bond, or you can light felt with the light table. So it's great, it's great.

That's a great thing about sewing and crafting is there's never only one way to do things, but it's great to share that knowledge, so um. Um, we also have a question. Julia says, do you know if the caterpillar glow could be used to mark quilting patterns on a quilt? And we both agree absolutely you could totally use it for that. Yeah, depending on how big it is, obviously you might have to like move your quilt around depending on, I don't know if you're marking it for like a long arm to quilt or if you're just marking kind of straight lines, but either way I find that the surface is big enough for sure for a quilt block, if not more, and any smaller project for sure.

And you just maybe need to move it around depending on how much you need to mark up but absolutely this would shine through. I would, I mean I had, I haven't tested on an actual like the three layers of quilt, the, you know, the backing, the batting on the top, but I can't imagine you wouldn't get something shining through there for sure through the top layer, yeah, even if you just put the top on, get your, your template lines and yeah you could definitely see through that absolutely um and then we have um. Some questions about where to get information about the product. So below this video, there will be links for each of the products we're talking about. You can click on those links and be brought to the product pages and get more info on that, um, on those pages.

So definitely check those out as well. Um, and then Gina asks what are the dimensions of the whole machine, so including the outer edges, um, I believe it's 13 by 19 is the dimensions of the whole thing, which also brings me to the point that it, I feel like it's large enough to do your project, but it's also small enough to be able to transport. And it comes with this amazing case which at first I was like yeah that's cool and then the more I thought about it I I'm like that's really cool because it's super padded you can throw all your accessories in here there's extra spaces for cords or anything else that you'd want to throw in here there's a space that's completely padded for the tempered glass that has like, you know, like how a laptop padding has the foamy kind of protective padding so you 100% could just like throw this in your car if you're going on a crafting trip or if you wanna bring it to. Do something with your kids or your girlfriends or something for the night or weekend or day or whatever you're doing it's super transportable so it's big enough to do a project but small enough where it's not taking up your whole car or taking up your whole table or something, which I appreciate. Yeah, and the carrying case is great too for even if you're not carrying it somewhere just for storage yeah 100% keep everything together, you know, slide it somewhere you're still in your your crafting room and that way when you need it it's all right there.

That's awesome love that. Um, Gina says thank you. I'm looking for lighting to go behind a stained glass work. Well that sounds beautiful. It would be great for that.

Awesome. All right, so if we don't have any more questions, and of course if you think of a question about the caterpillar, please, um, type that in even if we are on to the next product which do we have any other oh I had a question about this um, how do you charge this? So battery life is great, but it just comes with. cord comes with a cord just like a little USB deal, super easy, the little, you know, attaching little Velcro deal and all you do is plug it in also really long cord, which I appreciate. So if you get if you're somebody like me who never has devices charged, you still have a long enough cord if you need to be tethered to a wall, but it just plugs in here.

I'll show you. I love that it's just here. The US cord you can just use it a block, yep, ta da. That's great, just like charging every one of our devices these days, super easy and it actually um charges. I feel like really fast.

I don't know the ins and outs of batteries, but I feel like it charged fully really fast and it's maintained battery life really well on the highest, the brightest setting. That's great, yeah, very cool. Alright, well I love that product, um. And Julia asks what is the price point? Do you know off the top of your head, or are we going, um, but in the product list if you click like, like you said in the in the below of the video here that should have all the details as well as links to purchase or even just like look into it to get your your excitement flowing.

Yeah, there you go, yeah, OK, and let's see if we have any more questions. Julia says it would be a light board. Yes. Putting Henry stencils and then marking with a chalk pencil or marker. Yes, absolutely you can do that 100% sounds great.

chalk markers are really great because they're erasable in case something happens, you can erase them. Always good to be able to do that.