In my humble opinion, I think we should be able to take the entire month of December off. What do you think about that? Of course this is not economically feasible but a girl can always dream. With a little more free time, I would have more opportunities to play...I mean craft with the new updated version of Cricut DesignStudio and the newest cartridges of the past few months: Disney's Tinker Bell & Friends, Disney/Pixar Cars, Blackletter, Hello Kitty Greetings, and Hello Kitty Font! These have arrived just in time to help celebrate the festive season. I realize there are only two weeks until the schools let out for winter break. It is already apparent that the kids have mentally checked out and dreams of sugar plums have been dancing in their sweet little heads for some time now. So we've planned some fun Cricut activities with the school aged folks in my family. Perhaps we'll start some new Christmas traditions and create wonderful holiday memories

Happy Cricuting :-)

Today's helpful tip is from messageboard member rihelgrl. Thanks for sharing this helpful tip.

"I am new to using the Cricut (as many of us are) and I find that I don't always use the correct blade depth, pressure, etc. This leaves me with a piece that may still be connected or rough. I have been having very good results with the small, curved finger nail scissors. The curve allows you to trim around corners and the small size allows you to get into those tiny areas that seem to be the problem. I never use those scissors on my finger nails anyway, so they have finally found a purpose at my house."

Well Christmas is nearly here, I've been shopping like crazy to find just the right gifts. The great discovery of the new Christmas Solutions cartridge came at just the right time, I used a few of the images to create some tags for each of my gifts. Now my gifts look perfect with the ribbons and bows. There are so many cartridges that are new to the Cricut family; I have a wonderful selection to choose from when it comes to exploring the Cricut cartridges.

In this exploration I will be exploring the Hello Kitty Font cartridge. This font cartridge is a wonderful addition to the Cricut Family. You can cut four different fonts with this cartridge--WOW! You get the font that comes with the cartridge, plus a round, silhouette, and flower style. The additional creative features are: round shadow, shadow, and shadow blackout. This cartridge comes with upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers and some punctuation. The round feature shaves off each of the edges so yes the corners are all round, plus then add the shadow and you can make any title or accent letter pop on your scrapbooking page. The flower feature cuts every letter, number, or punctuation with a five pedal flower around it. This style could be used in creating a girls scrapbook layout or even a bulletin board border.

The original style that comes with the cartridge has curls and is a wonderful style that could be used in a bulletin board, scrapbook page, poster, or school assignment. The silhouette style has thinner lines and basically outlines each of the letters; you can cut upper and lower case with this style. If you are creating a poster or want a fatter letter you can use the shadow feature to cut out your words, and then add the shadow blackout for the letters to pop in your presentation.

Along with the letters, numbers, and punctuation you also get some phrases and images that complement each other. The phrases that come in this cartridge are: "hugs & Kisses", "Cutie Pie", and "Best Friends". The images that come with this cartridge are: Hello Kitty in a flower, Hello Kitty head, Hello Kitty full body, Hello Kitty doing the splits, Hello Kitty ballerina, Hello Kitty angel with a star wand, Hello Kitty angel with a heart wand, and Hello Kitty angel. All of these images come with the availability to cut layers to give each of the images dimension. The Flower feature adds a flower design around the image. These images are so cute, I think I will make some more tags for my Christmas presents using Hello Kitty's angel images, then my presents will be one of a kind. Yea, for me!

Check out next week as I continue exploring the new cartridges in the Cricut family.

Crafty Kimber

In the booklets, when it shows options for the different keys, the top option is what will happen if you press the shift key. If there is no shift key option it will say "not available". On the Animal Kingdom cartridge, for instance, there is an option for the sounds, but not a SHIFT option for the sounds. If you press the sound key, and then the animal, you will get the sound. If you press the sound key, the shift, and then the animal, you will get an error. In other words, the sound option should work, there is just no shift option to go with it. This is also true on the Mickey and Friends cartridge, among others. On the Pluto 1, there is a shift option for both the Layers: Face/White feature and the Layers: Shoes/Ribbon/Hat feature, but not an option without the shift.