Hi! This is Jane at Afloral and today, I’m going to be talking about our Still Pix Machine that we have here. It comes in a nice sturdy box like this and it comes with an instruction sheet. That contains the list of parts and some information but I’m going to give you a little hands-on demonstration today.
First thing I want to tell you is be sure and keep the box. If anything happens to your Pix machine and you need to have it repair, you have to mail it in and the box will serve that purpose for you. Here is our Pix Machine. It’s very, very heavy. I think it weighs about eight pounds. It’s made out of cast iron and it’s a nice sturdy machine and if you don’t have one of this, you really should have.
All right, it comes with this weight and this is also a heavy metal thing and we’re going to take that out first. I’m going to show you how to load the machine. We load it with still pix and they come in several different sizes. This is the three inch, that’s the longest size. This is a two and a quarter inch and then there’s also a shorter one that’s one inch. Two and a quarters kind of a standard size and that’s what I’m going to be demonstrating today.
When you open the box, it’s full of pix and they’re bundled off in little bundles and they have like a scotch tape around them. And these are very sharp like razor sharps so you want to handle them very carefully. To fill your pix machine, you take out a bundle of the steel pix and there’s kind of a little V-shape down the center of the pix and it has little teeth in here too. That’s going to be towards the front. The teeth are towards the front of the machine and the V-shape is downward. I’m going to slide that right down into the channel. Okay you can put one package in there or you could put two packages in there.
The first thing you want to do after you get your package in there, its bound with tape and so you want to take your knife, a little designed knife here and cut that tape over there, and just slide it out. Now if you take the tape off before you put the pix in there, you’re going to have 50 or 60 pix from all over so you want to slide it in there with the tape on it and then cut the tape off with your knife. Then the weight goes in to hold those pix down. Now you’re ready for business.
There’s a nice rubber handle here. The first thing you do is push the handle forward. That sends the pix out into the channel or your stem is going to go. And you take your flower stem and you probably want to cut it down to the length that you wanted. Put it in the center where the V-shape is up the pix and you want to be careful when you put the stem in here that you don’t move the pix, that you don’t slide the pix and you’ll see that there are little clamps that clamp the teeth right around the flower stem. But if you slide that pix when you’re putting your stem in there, its going to be out of line and it won’t clamp your stem. So you want to make sure that you don’t do that. You just gently put the stem on top of the pix and you push the handle backwards, push it down firmly, then your flower slides out with the pix on it and ready to put it in your foam.
Now I’m just going to give you a quick demonstration of why you want to use one of these pix machines. If you use a flower and it does not have a pix on it and you stick it on after your foam, eventually after that’s moved around it a little bit, that one is going to be more at to fall out. With the pix in there, there’s no way that this is going to fall out. It’s normally in that foam and there’s no way its going to come out.
The problem with a non-pix stem is, as it moves around in there a little bit, it makes the hole bigger and bigger and the arrangement is moved around and it’s eventually far in that hole. So you really need to get one of these pix machines especially if you’re working with things out on outdoors. One of our videos I made this monument and everything is picked. Outside where the wind is going to blow this stems, they’re eventually going to make them fall bigger and bigger and then they’re going to fall out. Also, in indoor centerpiece but maybe you’ll move around a little bit and as you move it around, that hole is going to get bigger and your going to lose your stem.
So I hope I’ve helped you learn how to use this pix machine. It’s really pretty simple machine and there are instructions here but maybe my demonstration has helped you understand it little better. I hope so.
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