Skimm’bassador, DIY crafter & Surface fan Kathy Capeluto
“Surface Pro 4 is everything I never knew I needed and can’t live without now!”
I met Skimm’bassador Kathy Capeluto recently through our partnership with popular e-mail news brief theSkimm, but she’s been a diehard Surface Pro 4 fan since she got it last year as a birthday present from her family. She jokes that it was somewhat fated because Surface Pro 4 and Book came out on October 26th– her birthday – but it might have had something to do with the above Tweet.
Kathy had an old Mac from college that needed upgrading, so she was looking around for a suitable replacement. When she saw her friend using a Surface Pro 3, she was intrigued. Her friend loved that it was a full computer but portable enough so that she could get clients to sign contracts right on screen, wherever they were. While Kathy didn’t need that, she did see the possibilities for her crafting.
“When I first started using Surface Pen, I shrieked with joy and immediately went to hug my mom to thank her for the gift she unknowingly gave me: my time back!”
While Kathy is a proud member of corporate America, she fully believes in the power of Work Craft Balance. She shared that for her, it’s less about “work life balance” than “work craft balance” because crafting has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. In fact, Kathy took a sabbatical from work in which she explored crafting more professionally.
Kathy ultimately decided that crafting is the perfect creative outlet to complement her day job. Having a touchscreen on a full computer is game-changing because she can ideate and create on her Surface. It saves her hours of work she would’ve had to do by hand, and lets her manufacture products with industry quality. She explained, “I draw on my Surface and then upload my work into the Cricut Design Space plug in, where I can clean up the images with ease thanks to the Surface Pen. Then my Cricut (imagine a printer that has a blade instead of an ink cartridge, and can cut cardstock, vinyl, and other materials) brings the digital shape to life.”
Thanks to her Surface (and Cricut), Kathy has a successful side business and seasonal Etsy shop. Kathy appreciates how she can take a picture on her iPhone, which immediately uploads to her OneDrive cloud storage so she can quickly edit it on her Surface and post to Etsy. She marvels about her Surface Pro 4 “it’s so fast and responsive.”
Beyond crafting, Kathy always takes her Surface with her on work trips because it’s so much lighter than her work laptop. “When I had to take an extended trip to Colombia, I just worked off my Surface the entire time.” It is also especially useful when she needs to entertain her nephew and Goddaughter.
The one flaw with Kathy’s Surface is that it lets her indulge her multitasking tendencies — while she cuts a design for an order, she can also be knee-deep in a black hole of YouTube videos, and simultaneously work on an Excel sheet organizing corporate metrics. She jokes that “multitasking is a myth but I can’t help myself, especially with my Surface.”