Cricut: you can teach an old machine new tricks

I have been playing with my CRICUT a lot lately, doing some invites with the New Arrivals and Wedding cartridges... BUT I finally broke down and purchased the SCAL software, it did seem a little pricey... I even tried the trial and really didn't have much luck with it so I dismissed it for a while then I continued to see what some others out there were doing with theirs so I decided to give it a real go! I am really happy and have been playing around with different images and figuring out how to take an image from drawing to cut out. It's a little lengthy process for me right now - I scan it with my HP, use PSE to manipulate it, open it with Inkscape (thank you for free downloads!!) and trace it there and save it as the .svg, THEN I open up SCAL and send it to the CRICUT!! Right now I'm refining a birdcage invitation which I think is going to be very nice once it's refined! I will try to post .svg files in the future once I'm a little more than amateur at this and will definitely post some new images up soon!