Every year as the Christmas Season approaches my mother and I get our craftiness on. For decorations as well as gifts we love to have that personal touch. I was especially excited for this year since I just got a new Cricut Expression 2 and was dying to try it out. My mother had bought a Cricut a few years ago along with a handful of specialty cartridges and loved it. She said there were soo many things we could easily make. As I said I could hardly wait.
I spent a few days browsing pinterest and other such sites for ideas so that when craft day came around I what I wanted to make. Having never used a Cricut before I was surprised at how easy it was to follow the directions and get started. My two little kids kept crowding me to get a better look as I put it to work cutting. Later when I showed my husband (who is an artist) all I had created with the Cricut, he was impressed and said I’ll have to show him how it all works.
Here are some of the things I made this last week with my Cricut in preparation for Christmas:
The first thing I decided to make was a fun holiday banner. I settled on the word “Believe” and chose the various sheets of Scrapbook paper we had on hand for the letters. Once I settled on the size for the letters it was just a matter of placing the paper on the sticky Cricut board, and started cutting out the individual letters, then peeled off the cut paper and letter then starting again with the next paper. While I was doing this my mother worked at cutting out the card stock for the letters to go on. We decided that Red was the best choice to pull all the paper designs together with a holiday look. Then she decided on squares instead of triangles to change things up. Once all the letters were cut out I glued them onto the Red squares and we attached them to a simple white ribbon to hang on the wall. I love how it turned out!
Using one of my mother’s Cricut cartridges I made these cute gift boxes/bags. They super fast and easy to make, and I can’t wait to fill them with homemade goodies like caramels, mints, and fudge etc.
After the boxes I couldn’t help but make some cute gift tags with the scraps of card stock I had leftover. I can’t wait to put these on our Christmas packages.
Now it was back to making more decorations. I decided it was time to pull out my vinyl to make a decorative (and useful) “Cookies for Santa” Plate and matching “Santa’s Milk” mug. Using vinyl is easy. Before cutting out the vinyl I cut out the letters in regular paper and laid them on the plate (and held them against the mug) to make sure I had the sizes just right. Then all I had to do was to cut the vinyl and carefully place each letter on the plate and mug. I could have used transfer paper but I usually reserve that for larger projects. Besides I like the slightly askew letters look for this project.
All in all I think I am becoming a Cricut addict for I can’t stop thinking about what else I want to do with my nifty machine.
