Schoolwork Display

Update (4 September 2012):  It's on the wall!  I chose to put it in the playroom above her toy cubby-shelf thing.  It was even motivation to get the playroom picked up so that I could take a picture.

My oldest starts Junior Preschool on Tuesday!  I can't believe that I'm sending Melodi, my two-and-a-half-year-old, off to school two days a week.  With preschool comes cute little art projects to enjoy, and with the start of school Pinterest has been teaming with beginning of school projects to do.

Here is the finished project, inspired by several pins that were rolling around in my head.  The artwork is my own, the "Melodi" was my first cut using Design Studio after getting my Cricut almost two years ago, and the alphabet pages are the contributions I made to an alphabet book swap on the Cricut Community Message Board.

How I Re-Purposed the Frame (inspiration 1, inspiration 2, there may have been more that I saw but didn't pin)

Raise frame on pushpins (inspiration), sand and paint.  Sand and paint some more.  Cut cork.  Adhere cork to glass from the frame using spray adhesive.  Trim cork.  Adhere second cork layer (wanted it thicker than a single layer).

Set cork/glass into frame.  Tap finishing nails into frame and bend over.  Add enough to secure firmly.

 

How I Made My Clothes Pin Push Pins

Take apart push pins and paint (inspiration) at the same time as the frame.  Put pins back together.  Hot glue the push pins to the clothes pins (inspiration).  Hot glue buttons to clothes pins.

I love how this project turned out, so now to figure out where to hang it and wait for Melodi to bring home her first piece of artwork from Junior Preschool. 

Melodi's First Birthday

Last Thursday was Melodi's birthday and we had a party for her on Saturday afternoon.  I had fun doing a project with my Cricut that wasn't a layout.  This was also the first time that I used design studio for a major project.

My mom bought Melodi a "Baby's First Birthday" onsie with a cupcake on it so we did a cupcake themed party.

I managed to fit all of the banner pieces on four 12x12 pages, including the frill that went along the top, using Design Studio.  I added letters to each of the pieces in DS to spell out "Happy Birthday Melodi" then backed the pieces using black paper.  On the four blank pendants at the beginning, end, and between words I added smaller black cupcakes.

After hanging the banner we decided to add a large cupcake above the banner.  I used a sharpie to define the frosting lines from the back of the cupcake, and also around the green backing of the dot cuts.

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.