Another LID & Composition Notebook Alteration

I finished up this weeks LID today.  Thankfully it was another one that was easy enough to adjust to my 8x8 size.  I did a spread of Melodi "climbing" the stairs for the first time.  The set of 6 pictures I used really tells the story from beginning to end.  I used my Cricut to create a title tag and some embellishment flowers.  If I had some cute little brads I would have used them in place of the flowers and pearls on the title tag.  Each of the four flowers are different, even if it's in just a little way.

William started his first batch of beer today.  When he was finished with the steps for today he asked for "one of those hard covered books," meaning a composition notebook, to keep track of what he's done in regards to brewing.  I asked if I could decorate it with my Cricut and he said that I could as long as it wasn't crazy.  After some rummaging I found one pretty easily.  I ended up covering it in two brown pieces using my corner cutter to match the corners of the notebook, and two colored strips (one red, one green) along the spine.  It was necessary to use as many pieces because there was no way a 12x12 piece of paper would cover it completely.  I did the center artwork completely with my Cricut.  A couple days ago someone asked in the forum if it was possible to weld letters around a circle, and since then I was really wanting to try it out on something, so this was the perfect opportunity.  I do need to figure out a apostrophe for his name, and if he wants some more embellishments later I'll add those too.  It turned out great and William has already started keeping track of his stuff in it.

Laying It Down (or Layout in Drawing) - LID

I discovered the community (forum / message board) portion of the Cricut site and have been reading through a lot of the posts.  Every week a group does a Layout in Drawing challenge where they post a layout and then everyone makes a page using that specific layout and posts it.  Unfortunately they do 12x12 pages and I do 8x8s so I can't fit as many pictures on each page.  I enjoyed participating in this and look forward to doing so again.

This page is title "Christmas Round 2" because we opened a second round of presents in early January.  Melodi was done with presents on Christmas day so it was great that we were able to do a second round after we received the last of the presents.  I used my Cricut to cut out the title circle and the three poinsettias.  Stickers (I think they're CM) that I've had for years were used for the title.

Crafting Area Makeover

I was in desperate need of an organizational makeover in my crafting area.  My storage solution when I first set up my tables was non-existent.  I was using my entire table top for storage so it was a juggling act to get any space on the table to actually create.  I had a spot for my paper cutter, which after I got my Cricut became a shared space so anytime I wanted to use the Cricut, the paper cutter had to be moved.  All of my stickers, pens, adhesives, and photos were in boxes in the corner of the table, and taking up a lot of space.  My Cricut cartridges sat up against the wall on the opposite end of the table from my machine, and I had 12x12 paper containers sitting off the edge.  I had said that I needed more light and when I had William come look at a layout I was working on he that I really did need more lighting.  Here are the before pictures, you'll have to excuse Melodi, but I didn't actually take before pictures.

Seeing as I was doing as much juggling of stuff while trying to create as I was spending creating it was time to figure out better storage solutions.  Originally I was thinking some sort of bookshelf or self-standing closet, that I could be covered up with fabric, closed with doors, or zip up.  When I mentioned to William that I needed some storage we stopped by the hardware store to look at options.  We ended up deciding on a shelf above my tables.  After returning home to consult the tape measure and William working a couple days, we bought a 11.75in x 97in shelf and 6 brackets.  We also looked at lights, but decided to wait to see what the shelf looked like after it was up.  William cut the shelf into two pieces so that it could wrap around the corner, found the studs, and put up the shelf.  Now that the shelf was up we went back to look at lights and decided on a set of three puck lights, that another light could be added to if needed.

The shelf turned out great! The only thing left to do is tidy up the lighting wires.  Everything has its place which makes it much easier for me to create since I have the table completely opened up.  The only things that live on the table are my Cricut and paper cutter.  My Cricut cartridges, tools, and manuals live on the short side of the shelf above the paper cutter.  This the closest spot to the computer that I have Design Studio loaded on.  in the corner (unaccessable without some work) are my scrapbooks that are a work in progress, but not actively being worked on (wedding, Air Force, high school).  Then we have tools (scissors, markers, adhesive/pen tubs).  The paper (12x12 and 8x8 pads) sat underneath some of the tools but now I have them standing upright within a Costco baby wipes box.  Next is my photo storage box which really only contains rejects from Melodi's book, wedding photos, and some other random photos from other projects (Air Force, Scott's trips).  Then we have a couple 12x12 bins that have paper that is not paper I normally reach for.  One has the paper I've had since I (with my mom) started scrapping, we're talking from the trip my family took to Hawaii in elementary school, maybe junior high.  The other has paper for my wedding and Air Force albums.  I've got some file folders that contain loose leaf paper, scrap paper, and stencils.  On top of these bins I have my sticker files.  Then I have my really current projects (the ones that I am actively working on).  The pink binder is Melodi's baby book (you know, the one that you write in all the firsts, keep track of growth and immunizations, and tell stories), the purple book is Melodi's state book (keeping track of the states that she has been to), and the pink scrapbook is Melodi's first year book (I'm almost at 80 pages, 40 sleeves, complete and just bought more sleeves to insert so that I can finish up the book after Melodi's birthday next month).  Finally, we have my cards bin, that I have all of my note cards in, along with return labels and stamps.

 

It's been great getting to create in my new space because I actually have the space to spread everything out.  I can even have six pages out at a time.  Yeah, my general December pictures are going to take six pages.

Clearance Cartridges

Last night I was looking at the Michaels sales ad to see if there was any paper on sale for my mom and saw that they were having a $9.99 clearance sale on select cartridges.  As a result I headed to Michaels as soon as we (Melodi and I) were up and ready.  I'm glad that they had some, and even happier I didn't try yesterday since they only had two choices.  Today I picked up five cartridges (50 States, Jubilee, Lyrical Letters, Paisley, and Sweet Treats) and decided against several others.

Melodi went down almost two hours early tonight so I had some extra time and was set on determining why I couldn't get all of the cartridges that I own to show up in Design Studio.  I had done a font pack patch when I was getting set up at the end of December which helped with some of the cartridges, but after today I was still missing three.  After consulting the Cricut forums and some other blogs I found that I needed to do a basic DS patch.  So I did the uninstall, download, reinstall and it works!  Now I have access to all of my cartridges in DS.

Haven't done any scrapping this evening, not sure I'll get around to it, but maybe a little later.

Deck the Halls Page is Finally Finished

I finally got all the pieces figured out and stuck down for the "Deck the Halls" page of Melodi's album, a two page spread that was three days in the making.  Overall it turned out really well, even if I ended up doubling up on photos from the page that has our JCP pictures.

I'm still trying to decide the best adhesive to use, but know that various ones will work best in different situations.  For the string of six sets of ornaments I ended up using adhesive squares.  It worked rather well, probably better than trying to use a glue pen.

I ended up recutting the ornaments for the journalling block using the DesignStudio to make it one piece instead of four to glue down.

  

I settled on a compromise for the title (once again the photo doesn't show the colors true) and used the semi-bright green behind the green dot for the shadowing. I attempted to create an additional cream backing using a larger size of the shadow (semi-bright) but it didn't work at all.

A Major Update after a Couple Busy Days

Haven't gotten too much done in the last couple days.  Finished up the "Let it SNOW" page last night (5th) and started a layout for a "Deck the Halls" page.  As you'll notice later I ended up adding a "Christmas Jammies" page in between these two because I forgot about it.


Let it SNOW

Love how the snow page turned out, with the exception of wishing that I would have used a Cricut cut snowflake shadow behind the glitter snowflake sticker on the top right corner of my journal box.  Still got to get it through my mind to think about what resources I have.

Christmas Jammies

Lucky for pictures, I just about forgot a page.  As I was going through photos to add for the next page I came across the "christmas jammies" page. In interest of a true chronology I will add this in (I've already finished writing the next section on "Deck the Halls").  As was tradition in my family growing up we received new pajamas on Christmas Eve, that was typically the only present we opened before Christmas morning, although that really varied by year, we all opened up a present, pajamas, at 2am on Christmas morning.  Why 2am, that's no longer Christmas Eve, you may ask.  I will refer you to my 10 month old who completely and utterly crashed on Christmas Eve before we got around to opening the present, and then decided to be up for a diaper change and a meal at 2am, then didn't want to go back to sleep, so we opened a present.

This page ended up being a rather strange color combination, but I think it turned out well.  Ironically, Melodi was wearing monkey pajamas, and was opening monkey pajamas too, which is really where all the colors came from.  I was planning on using the actual cut out brown letters for the title, but flicked the "c" away and couldn't find it so I used the "scrap" instead.  Love how it turned out!

Edit to add:  I found out through reading the message boards or someone elses blog that the reason that the tall letters (h, i, t, and j) are not straight inline with the rest of the letters is that I had the "material/paper saver" mode turned on.

Deck the Halls

As I mentioned before the next page I started working on was a "Deck the Halls" page last night (5th).  Basically, I picked out the main paper last night, the green dot and the cream/red/green strip.  This will be an nontraditional two page spread, meaning that the base paper will be different but both pages will us the same paper for the basic design.  As I write this I'm wishing that I would have taken a few more pictures in order to do a basic, intermediate, fancy, extreme sort of progression (so, I may go back and take the extra photos later and update this post).

Originally I was going to lay out my spread with the "action" shots on the left and the "stills" on the right.  But I think that I will actually do just the opposite because of title and journallying placement (mostly title).

As you may notice there are some "extra pieces" at the top of the photos, we'll get to those in a minute.  First, I would like to address the title.  I started off with thinking that I would use a solid semi-bright solid green for the shadow, the red for the phrase, and the green dot for the phrase pieces.

The pictures are a little deceiving, but that means I'll look at the actuals before I stick it down for good.  In person the semi-bright green is way too bright to match the rest of the page even with the semi-bright green line in the backing paper.  Since I wasn't sure about the bright green (first piece I cut) I decided to try out the shadow in the green dot and like it a lot better.  The cutting procedure here was bright green, then red, and finally green dot.  As a result of this order I decided that in addition to cutting the planned phrase pieces out of the green dot I would also cut the shadow since I didn't love the semi-bright green.  Well, that's about in on the title, so we'll move on to the embellishments.

I decided that I should tie in the red paper that I used for the title a little bit.  As I was thinking about this page I was thinking that I should us an ornament cut out some where since that's what Melodi "gave" her parents (William and I), grandparents, and great-grandparents for Christmas, as shown in the photos on the page.  There really wasn't room, or the necessity (it would make it seem crowded) for a full size ornament, so I ended up deciding to use a border in a couple different places.  The first place I decided that I wanted to use it was in between the top and bottom rows of "action" photos.

I got those cut out and placed then decided that I should try to use them on the other side of the spread as well, another great way to connect the two pages.  Since I was planning on a fairly large journalling box I figured that I could add the boarder to the top of it.  I ended up cutting out two different sizes and still don't know which ones I'm going to actually use yet.

We'll see how much I end up writing and in the planning for the writing I'll decide on the border size to use.  I wasn't too sure on how large to make my journalling box but ended up deciding on a 4" x 4" square of cream paper (considered using a green).  As you may have noticed there was a strip of green dot paper on one of the previous two pictures, that's because if I get to the end of my journalling and there is still room I will put a strip there to sort of frame in the box.

The final placement I have to decide on is that of the spoon ornament.  This is a photo of Melodi's 1st Christmas ornament that we bought her to commemorate the event.  I will either line the bottom up with the bottom of the other photos in the row or where the bottom is about halfway down the green dot stripe.

Hopefully I'll get this page done tomorrow night (7th) since it will be three days in the making by then.  I'm a little worried about securing the border pieces because they are rather thin in places.  Sorry about the random numbers, they're the dates, but I'm up after mid-night here so the days are starting to run together.

Getting Good Use Out of the Cricut

I ordered some 160 photos today and picked them up this afternoon.  The photos span November and December, and even a few days into January.

The first page that I did this evening was Melodi's stocking page because I had a really cute idea that has been rolling around in my head since Christmas (and learning what cartridges William had bought me).  I used the Winter Frolic cartridge to make a stocking and put the picture of her pile of stocking stuffers "in" the stocking.  The phrase on the the stocking key was "the stockings were hung" which I cut out as well.  The first paper I used for the phrase overlays was the same as the strip which didn't look very good when I was planning it out after I had cut the pieces out, so I decided on a different paper.  Since the white strip in the stocking body was making the outline of the stocking a little weird I ended up cutting the shadow out of the same paper I used for the phrase overlay.  I really like how the page turned out.

The next page I did was the "Under the Christmas Tree" presents.  Couldn't include too many pictures, but that's okay.  Didn't use the Cricut much, but I did cut out a tree.  It's the same one that I did when I first got the machine, but I didn't do any of the decorations, just the tree outline.  I was going to use an "oh Christmas tree" title from the Cricut but I cut it out and didn't like it very well.

Well, I needed a short break from being creative so I left a half finished (mostly planned, nothing stuck down) page sitting on my table downstairs.  The page is of Melodi "playing" in the snow for the first time.  Had a hard time picking out paper cause of the colors, but I'm down to sticking everything down, journalling, and then adding embellishments.  I cut out a "Let it SNOW" title, and once again learned that the heavy cardstock causes more work then a standard paper.  I think the best cuts from a heavy cardstock will end up being extremely block cuts with little detail at all (the shadows).

All Caught Up!

I got caught up with Melodi's scrapbook last night.  I consider myself to be up to date although I still have 2 months to scrap, but seeing as I don't have the pictures printed to do so there isn't anything I can scrap in her book.  The other spread that isn't done is from our trip to California in October, but I need to get a picture for that one still.

There were a few pages that I had finished with the exception of some journalling so those got finished up.  I went back and finished the journalling from Melodi's newborn pictures with Stacey.  Put together three pages (starting solids, general October, and Liz and Evie's visit) and did the journalling on the four pages that encompass fall and Halloween, as well as Melodi's first big girl bath.

The Cricut got a break from working pretty much the entire evening.  I used it to cut out "october" and then ended up using the scrap instead of the letters.  First I tried to cut out every other letter in green or pink using the matting paper, which made a mess of my cutting mat, so I ended up using a basic paper that I was going to use for my journalling anyways.

First Scrapbook Pages with the Cricut

I had a basic layout set up for Melodi's scrapbook page of our Christmas photos that we had taken at JCPenney.  All it needed was a little embellishing with a title and some design elements.  I started off with a thick, textured red cardstock for the title, border, and smaller circle.  After a number of different settings on the Cricut and making a mess of my cutting mat I gave up and used a standard paperstack paper.

As I was writing this typing "embellishing" made me think to add some sparkle to the page using some gems that I put on the ornaments I made for Melodi's grandparents and great-grandparents with a couple of these pictures.

I was in a little bit of a rut and have a bunch of pages to catch up on right now in Melodi's book, but none of them were really speaking to me.  In the end I ended settling on Melodi's first big girl bath by herself in the bathtub.  I used the Brittany bathtub cut (Playtime) and its layer then cut off the top portion of the backing piece, and a variety of sizes of the circle and its shadow (Classic Font) to make bubbles.  Since I had a couple circles left I ended up using them on the journaling box.  Haven't pasted anything down or done the title or journaling yet, but that will come.