First of all I would like to say that I am not affiliated with Silhouette nor with Nicapa, and that I am simply reviewing a purchase I made.

I’ve started using my Silhouette Cameo 3 in 2016, and I has been a difficult and challenging journey.

One of the first challenge with the Silhouette is to master the art of cutting with the machine. You can find a lot of videos showing you how to setup the cutting machine, load the mat and remove the paper from the mat. But you have to try your own cutting settings because each material will have its proper cutting settings.

The silhouette Studio now allows you to save the settings you make, which is a great improvement ! But I’ll explain all of that in another post. For now I would like to talk to you about the cutting mats.

Let’s talk about the cutting mats

When I ordered my Silhouette Cameo 3 I received a cutting mat along with the machine. It worked perfectly but as I was testing a lot of different settings I damaged it by cutting too deep into the mat sometimes. So I decided to purchase new ones, and as a lot of people, I decided to purchase them on Amazon.

Of course, I immediately came across very cheap ones. And they looked exactly like the one I had already, so I thought it was a good deal. Oh boy, was I wrong.

The stickiness of the mat went off quickly. VERY QUICKLY. I had to use masking tape to keep the paper on the mat because the paper wasn’t sticking to the mat at all. Very disappointing.

So I came to the conclusion that if you want to use the official one, you can’t buy them from Amazon. You can only buy them from Silhouette’s or affiliates store.

The thing was I needed a new mat fast.. So I thought, if I’m ordering from Amazon, I’m gonna order a totally different brand to try and see if its worth it.

And this is why I tried Nicapa’s cutting mat. They are cheap. I paid 16 € for a set of 3 cutting mats : light grip, standard grip and strong grip.

I expect they are going to loose their stickiness fast, but as I’ve got three mats now I might be able to use them longer before buying new ones. I’ll keep you updated regarding the time they lasted.

Regarding the mats in themselves, they look good. They are thicker than the Silhouette’s mat. Some say that it’s not good for the machine because it’s not used to thick mats. I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but when using the mats I had no problem whatsoever.

On the contrary, it worked perfectly. The paper was easy to remove, it didn’t move during the cutting, the mat wasn’t damaged after cutting.

The only thing I would say is that it’s very sticky, or at least it is very sticky at the moment : after cutting, the back of the paper had traces of glue, but the traces were easily removable by rubbing a tissue on the paper.

I expect that this effect will fade, or maybe you could just remove the excess of stickiness by applying a printing paper on the mat and removing it a few times.

To conclude I would say that for the price this is a very decent product. I don’t know if it will last long, and I will update this post in little while to let you know. But if you are looking for a cheap cutting mat, I would try it. You could keep it as a backup cutting mat for when your ‘official’ ones are too tired to work.

I hope that this review has been helpful for you !

Cheers,
Alice