My Cricut had a HUGE work out on Wednesday - three and a half hours of constant cutting. I had designed bulletin board borders and fill for my future daughter in law's classroom. Crissie is a theater teacher so I used tickets as the theme. Most teachers need a word wall - words that apply to their area of study. For part of the border I cut Crissie's theater words in the tickets, backing the tickets in a contrasting color, filling in the negative areas (middle of D, P, O, etc), making the words readable. I also made large, super-sized tickets for Crissie to use a mats for her photos of Broadway shows. There were more cuts, some very detailed and some very simple.
My son was in town for two days and I wanted to send Crissie' bulletin board cuts home with him to save myself a trip to the post office (I hate going to the post office!). To wind up this long tale, I taught Aaron to use my Cricut with Design Studio. I had to cut one page in my design over and over again so I decided Aaron could do this. He did great, and cut the ticket borders while I worked on the word wall tickets.
Aaron left for home a bit later than he planned, but with all of the materials for Crissie's bulletin boards in tow.
After that work out I decided that my Cricut had earned a rest. Actually I intended to cut pieces for a card and use an older set of Close to My Heart stamps, but I started playing with the stamp set and never used the Cricut.
I was using an older fall stamp set. I begin by stamping a solid pumpkin in embossing ink onto textured cardstock. I then used three colors of embossing powders to highlight and define the shape. I used scissors to cut out the stamped image.
I used oval nestabilities and cut out matting for my pumpkin. And at this point I took a serious detour through - play - with - toys - in - a - new - way - land!
I came across a package of shrink film and decided to play with that. Actually at first I wondered if I could stamp on acetate and let it dry. It never dried nicely. So I moved on to shrink film. I stamped the pumpkin shaped word overlay stamp (the same size as the embossed pumpkin) onto the film. I cut out the pumpkin and then used my embossing gun to shrink the film. It looked good, except it needed color.
I stamped the base pumpkin and colored in the shape with orange Copic marker. I then stamped the words over the marker. After shrinking the pumpkin with the heat embossing gun I had created the pumpkin charm on the front of the card!
Basically I spent three hours playing with embossing powders, stamps, acetate, shrink film and ink... And ALL I managed to create was one Thanksgiving card. (Shaking my head at myself) .... I am a bit amused and a bit annoyed with myself. On the other hand, I did have a learning opportunity with the shrink film.
