Fun With My Cricut Imagine

I LOVE my cricut Imagine. It allows me to make some great looking cards in a realatively short amount of time with one sheet of white paper. These are a couple of cards I have made with my newest Imagine cartridges, All Wrapped Up, Buccaneer, and Lori's Garden.

This first card was made as a challenge for the Cutters Creek Design Team. Kim sent us all a pack of her flowers and we had to make a Mother's Day project with them. I decided to cut this beautifl birdcage image from Lori's Garden and use the micro roses to pop out the flowers on the image. I popdotted the entire image up from the background paper (also from Lori's Garden).

I added some ribbon and bows to one side and some pearls in the corner of the other side. This cartridge was made for pearls. I decided to try something different for the sentiment on this card. I set my Imagine to print only and filled the sentiment Happy Mother's Day from the Calligraphy cartridge and filled it with a pink color. I cut it with a labels 4 nestie and then matted it with a larger nestie cut in the same pink color. Using the Imagine to print sentiments like this is a great way to create some quick and easy sentiments for your cards that match perfectly.

For this next card I used the new cartridge Buccaneer. This cartridge is full of some really cool pirate art work. I couldn't decide which image to cut first, so I let my daughter pick. She picked this scary looking pirate ship and the red striped paper for the background.

I added some black gingham ribbon and voila- a boy card.

Now, it took so much out of me to make a boy card, so I had to go back to something girlie. The new cartridge All Wrapped Up has some great card and box designs. I picked this little Russian doll image and used it to make a birthday card for my niece.

I love all the bright springy colors on this cartridge. I'm making sure I give my Imagine a lot of love this week, because next week it will be expecting a new little sister- the Expression 2!!!!!

Paper Crafting World!!!

I am thrilled to announce I am now a part of the Papercrafting World deisgn team. Papercrafting World has tons of adorable digital stamps and cut files to use with your digital cutter. We will be hosting challenges on the blog and there will be a free file included for you to use in the challenges. Our first challege has an Easter theme. I have used 2 of Melin's adorable files on this card.

I cut this adorable bunny and chick with Make the Cut. I cut the pieces out of Basic Grey paper and inked around the edges with chalk ink. I placed the chick on top of the bunny before I added his left arm to make it look like he was holding the chick. I stitched around the edges of the card and then added a border punched with a doily punch. I added a beautiful paper gardenia up in the corner and surrounded it with little green branch punches. I love how cute these cutting files are and I can't wait to play with more of them. They are very easy to cut and piece together.

Paper Pieced Tilda

I thought I would share one of my favorite stamping techniques- paper piecing.  I used to see cards that were paper pieced and I loved how they looked but I wasn’t quite sure how they were made.  I finally figured it out and I’ve loved it ever since.  To start with you need to pick your image and make sure it has a large enough area to paper piece.  You don’t want to drive yourself crazy when it’s time to cut it out.  Then you need to pick a patterned paper with a pattern that is small enough to repeat inside your area.  Papers with small patterns or 6 x 6 papers are great for this.  For my card I chose to paper piece the egg part of this Tilda stamp.  I started by stamping the image on my white paper. 

Then I stamped the same image on my patterned paper.  I printed a small rectangle on my Imagine and filled it with a pattern from the Hop Scotch cartridge. 

Next I colored the parts of my image that weren’t going to be covered with the paper.  I used copic markers to color Tilda.  Her shirt is a combination of R24, R22, and R20.  Her skin is E02, E00 and E000, and her hair is E37, E35, and YR23.  I also added a little R20 to her cheeks. 

Then I cut out the egg part of the image stamped on the pattern paper.  You need to use some small sharp precision scissors to do this.  It is also good good to cut a little bit inside the stamped line or right on it so that it will fit just inside the part of the image it’s intended to replace when you piece it together.  For this image I needed to cut the bottom and the top half of the egg. This is what my image looked like when I had the bottom of the egg in place.

Finally I glued the top half of the egg in place and assembled my card.  All papers are from the Imagine Hop Scotch cartridge. I hope you have enjoyed my tutorial and that you give paper piecing a try.  It is great to cover large areas you don’t want to color or an easy way to add pattern to an image. 

Cutters Creek Shopping List

Copic sketch markers

Cricut Imagine Hop Scotch cartridge

Fun Cricut Cards

I am determined to stop collecting cricut cartridges and start using them. I sat down and went through all the ones I've bought that haven't been used. The list was embarassingly long, so I started on a mission to use them all. I have found that usng the Imgaine app on my Gypsy make it really easy to put a card together. You can choose the background paper(s) you want and then fill the layers of your image from the same Imagine cartridge. This way you're sure everything is color coordinated. I laid out a lot of the new cartridges and had my daughter pick an image she liked off of them. She picked this little giraffe from the Sugar and Spice lite cartridge. I filled the layers of the giraffe with a pattern and a solid color from the Imagine More Cards cartridge. I popped him up from a scallop circle (also from Sugar and Spice and filled with pink from Imagine More Cards). The background paper for the card is the same polka dot pattern I used on the giraffe, but I printed and entire 12 x 12 piece of it. The cool thing about the Imagine is that it scales the pattern to the size of your cut. On the 12 x 12 sheet of paper the dots are much larger than they are in the smaller giraffe. It's nice to be able to cut smaller elements without losing the pattern. I cut the sentiment from the Simply Charmed cartridge and filled it with a darker shade of pink, then I finished the card off with some ribbon and a bow. For this next card, I used the Sweethearts cartridge to cut the large damask shape. I filled the main shape and the shadow with pattern from the Elise Imagine cartridge. I cut a square from another pattern to use as my background paper. I wanted to add something else, but I couldn't decide on a sentiment. I chose this border from the Martha Stewart Elegant Cakes cartridge and filled it with this sand color from Elise. The Martha Steward Elegant Cakes cartridge has a lot of the same designs you find in the Martha Stewart punch around the page punches, but the cartridge takes up less room than all the punches. I still have a lot more cartridges to get through, but it's really been a lot of fun reconnecting with my cricut.