It's a printer which cuts patterns from many different types of material. You simply use one of the pre-supplied images, or you can create your own, then feed in card, paper, vinyl, sticky-backed plastic (a la Blue Peter!) or iron-on fabric and it cuts the precise shape for you. One supported use is for glass etching. You can cut the silhouette you want from adhesive vinyl, then stick that to a glass and apply glass-etching paste to produce your own design on the family glassware. As the paste is almost certainly based on hydrofluoric acid, goggles and gloves would probably be advisable :-))