My Baby Girl is Already 3 Months!

Merry Christmas Eve!  My little girl turned three months old and I used one of the free images with my trial subscription on the Cricut Explore to cut out a Christmas owl.  I just love his Santa hat and scarf!

 

The chocolate and champagne cardstock was used from some Pathfinding Paper Packet scraps.  The rest of the sign was from the Yuletide Paper Packet.  With the exception of the branch which I just grabbed from my stack of scraps that I never seem to get organized.  But... on this day it served it's purpose.

 

I set this layout up in the Cricut Explore software called Cricut Design Space.  I did it for months 3, 4 and 5.  Mostly because I was wanting to take advantage of other cute owls that are included in the 2 week trial subscription for images.  I learned an important lesson!  That was too many mats on one project.  Maybe my internet is just too slow... that could totally be the problem.  If you are like me - sometimes you cut an image and need to recut it.  In my case there were 12 mats needed and I need to recut something at mat 10 and 11.  To get to that mat you need to patiently wait each time you click next mat.  There must be a better way... This means I need to spend more time working with the machine to figure it out.  Bummer!  ;)

 

 

A Hopscotch Thank You

Good Morning.  I shared the second project I made using my Cricut Explore and didn't want to forget to share the very first project.  This card took me literally 10 minutes to make.  It would have been even less but I was motivating myself to get other stuff done when the machine was cutting, so I wasn't right there when it stopped each of the phases.

This card was created by Cricut and is one of their ready-made projects.  All you have to do is choose the project, chose your paper and load your mat.  It almost feels like cheating to include it on my blog, so I'm trying to balance that out by sharing how much I truly love this machine.  :)

I chose this card because it has some intricate cuts and I wanted to see how it worked right out of the gate.  One of the cutting problems I ran into with my Cricut Expressions 1 was that I didn't seem to get the pressure and speed right.  That guessing work has been taken out of the equation with the Cricut Explore.

I have wanted to use the Hopscotch Paper Packet since it made it's way to my doorstep a couple months ago and decided the shapes the Explore was going to cut for the card would match one of the patterned papers perfectly.  I hope you like it. 

Yuletide Christmas Banner

Good Morning!  I'm very excited about the Merry Christmas banner I created using the Yuletide Carol CTMH paper packet along with the coordinating Yuletide Carol Assortment.

This was the second project I made with my new Cricut Explore.  I have to say that I absolutely love this machine.  For all my accounting friends out there this Cricut is like moving from manual posting of journal entries on green sheets to an accounting software that posts the transactions with the click of a button. 

I decided on the Yuletide Carol paper for a couple reasons.  First, I really like deep reds and deep greens.  Secondly, I liked the way there were a couple papers in the packet that already had their own distinguishing characteristics.  For example, the red paper I used for the M in Merry was mostly red but also included some cream swirls. 

It was easy to use the leftover scraps from cutting out the banner to help add more color and excitement to each of the letters.  In addition to the scraps I used the Gold Shimmer Trim,  Gold Sequins and the Bling Gems Gold Assortment.