Catching up again...

Yeah I know - where does the time go... I'm sure it was still February just yesterday... well the weather seemed very much like February - wind and rain - just ready for today being Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK...

Right - where do I start? Having now sold my original Cricut Personal because I now have the all-singing-all-dancing Cricut Mini, I'm finding that it is not quite as wonderful as I first thought. Sure, using Cricut Craft Room to design everything I want to cut exactly how I want it is great - BUT you have to be online to do so - so I can't take it to a crop 'cos my laptop doesn't have a roaming internet connection. And whilst that isn't so much of a problem, it is a little frustrating... having said that I'm still having fun cutting things on it!

One of the first things I made was a cute little basket  - don't ask me which cartridge its from, George and Basic Shapes I think - but it looked so cute that I decided to play and managed to centre a heart shape onto one of the large panels to cut out...

I'd used a double-sided cardstock with a darker shade on the reverse taken from the Cricut cardstock pads that are ready cut 6x12 - I know my Mini mat can take wider but for playing around I thought the pad would be perfect.

It looked great when assembled and the cut-out heart glued into place onto the other large panel... Yeah I know, twee... but it's a start in working out how to use CCR...

Then I got cocky and decided that a 'word book' was next on the agenda... having been to Scotland twice last year I have loads of pics so decided that the word would be 'Scotland' and that I'd print out lots of the photos quite small and stick 'em in... that was before my wireless printer decided to disconnect itself from my home network - AGAIN - so I can neither print nor scan... I'll get round to sorting it eventually!

So after a lot of trial and error I finally came up with the letters for the word 'Scotland' - all nicely welded onto rectangles to give the right spacing between the letter pages, base pages cut from either white or grey cardstock, then just the letters cut from sheets of tartan paper I'd bought in a craft shop in Oban in July (ye gods - do I get a prize for actually using something I've bought within a year of its purchase???)

As you can see its over 12" long when finished - I actually cheated and glued the cut letter-strips onto strips of acetate having made sure I'd added on about half an inch to allow for binding. That didn't figure in my initial workings, but I think I've gotten away with it - especially as I can maintain that I'd planned on using a strip of black'n'white spotted Washi Tape on the bound edges!

The backs of each page are covered in some rather fetching tartan wrapping paper that I'd also bought on holiday, it was actually the reverse of an aerial photo of Inverrary which is why in the picture above you might be able to see bits of trees and grass in the centres of the letters... I'd thought ahead and bought 2 sheets of the same, thinking I could certainly make use of both sides lol...

Ever the crafter - even on holiday...

Oh my - I love my Cricut Mini!

Yeah yeah, I know... I've only had it 48 hours... but I'm seriously starting to find what I can do with it - I have a loooong way to go but I'm really pleased with what I have managed to do so far.

Spent Thursday morning pacing around my flat waiting for Parcelforce to arrive, which it finally did at about 12.30pm... ripped the box open to find this cute little machine, instructions etc - but no UK power lead... so a quick phonecall to Angela at Craft at Home and she said she'd put one in the post to me.

However, that was going to take a few days to get to me, and I was itching to get started... and by now my friend Tim had arrived and was laughing at me... then pointed out that the US power cord merely plugged into a standard transformer using a universal 'D' connector - just like the one that I use on the radio in my kitchen... so as a temporary measure I swiped the radio power lead, plugged it in and off we went...

Didn't take too long to get everything installed and up and running, even managed to successfully redeem the code for the free Cricut content for the craft room software - you get Cricut Font and Basic Shapes which is 3 alphabets and loads of brilliant shapes to use - and then I sat down to play.

And play. And play some more. And watch the tutorial video's again whilst playing - copying what they were doing to teach myself what to do. Luckily, as I have spent several years using DTP and graphics drawing software, I found the craft room quite easy to use, but can see how someone who is not used to that type of program could get easily bogged down.

The hours passed... Tim left me to it 'cos he could see he wasn't going to get any sensible conversation out of me... my fella even briefly popped in, took one look at me giggling at the machine and wisely beat a retreat to the kitchen to make me a cup of tea... and after a while even he went home for his tea and left me alone... and I'm still having a whale of a time - linking the cartridges I own, cutting images out of each one to see how they worked... looking for more video's on Youtube to see what else I could do and generally having a great time.

Eventually my stomach decided to let me know it was supper time - blimey it was 9pm... wondered why it was getting dark and cold in the lounge... so I quickly nuked something and then it was back to my Cricut and more videos and more cutting... it's a good thing Angela popped a lovely pack of 12x12 paper into the box with the Cricut 'cos I can see me going thru loads whilst I experiment - having said that, the paper is too nice to 'waste' on trials but luckily I have a load of plain cheap cardstock I can use instead. The Cricut Mini mat is 8.5 inches by 12 inches, so A4 paper/card works a treat - I can see me investing in a few generic pads of that size in the sales!

Time flies when you're having fun, so they say - at 1.15am I found myself posting on UKScrappers about something and being horrified at the time - good thing I had Friday booked off work... I eventually got to bed around 3am (and no I didn't take it to bed with me lol... altho the thought did cross my mind...)

So here she is - in all her glory - with her cutting mat (already showing major signs of wear in the top left corner!)... she's about half the height of my Cricut Personal (the original/first machine that came out) and certainly a heck of a lot lighter. She's connected via USB to my laptop and all designing is done via the online craft room (god help me when I lose internet access which happens from time to time...). This does mean that I won't personally be able to take it to my scrapbook crops as I have no way of connecting my laptop to the web when I'm out and about which is a shame (yeah I know I could get a dongle but that costs money which I don't have...)

So, Friday was spent playing some more and reading up loads of blogs and finding out more about the Cricut Mini - I hadn't realised just how new a beast it is, cos it was apparently only released in November 2011. I've never had anything craftwise that is so brand new! I even turned down the option of going down t'pub on Friday nite, preferring to stay in with my Mini and carry on faffing around with her (mind you, the deadly state of the pavements around here that are still caked in ice, and the sub-zero temperature may have had something to do with it too!)

So - to sum up - I am one very happy bunny - and I'm determined to make the most of this machine and get it to cut loads of stuff that I've designed myself - and my next post will show off something I've done today... but I'm in dire need of a cuppa so you'll have to wait a few minutes... :-)

And - I'm a winner again!

Don't know what I have done to deserve this, karma is obviously kicking in to treat me nicely this week after the downs I have had recently, but last nite I entered a giveaway on Craft At Home's Facebook page to be in with a chance of winning the new Cricut Mini electronic die-cutting machine - we had to answer a simple question "how big is the cutting mat?" and then say what our last craft purchase was and why we'd bought it. So I trotted out the answer as being 8.5" by 12", and that I'd bought (amongst other things) 2 pots of Claudine Hellmuth's acrylic paint...

The competition was being drawn at 9pm, and I was out at a crop in Gt Wakering, didn't get in until 10pm and leapt straight onto their Facebook page, but I didn't see any postings as to who had won, even tho I kept refreshing the page... it wasn't until just gone midnight that the message popped up on my screen (having been posted 3 HOURS EARLIER) and Oh. My. God. the winner was me...

Now I already have a Cricut machine, but the first model that came out, and it's a second-hand one at that (altho I knew the previous owner and she'd not abused it at all!) and of course the Cricut Mini was only released about a year ago, so is definitely the new kid on the block... I'm so looking forward to receiving it and playing with it.

It'll use the cartridges I already own, but you can design your cuts on your computer using Provocraft's online craft room software and then cut them out - the mat being bigger than my current one means I can cut from 1/4" up to 11.5". And designing your cuts via the computer means I can place things exactly where I want them to make the most use out of the space available.

Right, that's enough of an advert for Provocraft - but I must say a huge thank you to Craft At Home for running the competition and for randomly picking my name out of the cyber-hat - next weeks courier delivery cannot come quick enough!

Oh, and the crop I went to? it was run by Total Papercrafts, lovely kit and good easy to follow instructions altho I didn't finish it, however I'm hopefully out at another crop this Saturday (weather permitting) so will get it done then. Having not been to a crop since well before Christmas it was good to get the ol' grey cells working in a crafty fashion and not just for work purposes!