One Craft a Week!

So it has been a few weeks since my last post and it has been a busy last few weeks! My full-time day job has been keeping me busy, so my free time has been limited. But at last... I am finally able to get back into these awesome hobbies! Between the mumble jumble with work and just trying to relax at home , I did a few shopping sprees. In my last post I mentioned that I had just bought a Cricut Maker... well it has been a blast so far exploring all the functions and features it has!

As part of my "destress 2020" escapade, I have made a goal to do some kind of "craft" at least once a week (and to write about the experience on here).

Since it has been two weeks since my last post (or has it been more?), I ended up doing about 2-3 different activities either this weekend or during the very short periods of time I could actually relax.

My first project on the Cricut was one of the "out of the box" projects. It was basically just a quick cut. I choose some images from the initial "get started" set. Followed the instructions from Design Space and bam (well after a few minutes of the machine cutting) ... I had "Hello Autumn" and the picture of the mountain and leaves cut! I could not just stop with that, I took those cuts and placed them on a thick cardboard (postcard size) and decorated it up! Behold... below is my first creation using the Cricut Maker!

My second adventure was seeing how I could make stickers. A LONG time ago I had bought some full page labels... so I figured why not give that a try. This adventure I would say is probably way easier to do then just a cut as you do not need to worry about transferring the actual cut pieces to another item. This project was really fun to do. I asked my husband what he wanted to see and of course he said Halloween. So I browsed around on Design Space and found quite a few Halloween images that I thought would be great stickers. I also attempted to use some images I bought in a Big Image Bundle (which you can see on the right as the Bear, Deer, Skunk, and Reindeer).

The last project (which I did this weekend) was attempting to do some paper crafts. I looked around design space for some ideas. I really like intricate designs, mandalas, flowers and things of that nature (maybe you could call me a geeky hippy?). This project was actually three different designs in Design Space. One for the electric candle holder (in the back), one for the big flowers, and one for the smaller flowers. Level of complexity was medium-hard. The big flowers really required patience and holding the item tightly so it would not loosen up. All in all - I am pretty happy with the results. Once I got a hang of the big flower (red was the first one and the blue the second) it was much easier. The smaller flowers were "twist up" style... so those also required ensuring a tight hold, but were WAY easier to do. The candle holder was very easy, it just took time for the design to cut. Lesson learned on the candle holder is that you really need thicker paper (you can not use 110gsm paper) if you want the intricate cut to work. As you can see it did not work out exactly perfect... but it was not a complete botch either.

Also - this week I used my new photo box to take the pictures of my flowers and candle holder :). I hope you like the placement and lighting!

Next week I have a few projects in mind... I may do some with the vinyl, infusible ink, and picture frame/shadow boxes! I have not decided on what though so either you will seen a ton of projects again or just one! You will just have to wait and see.

Thanks all and see you next time.