Who in their right mind could get away with waking a person from an afternoon nap by "tap dancing" in a tutu and humming the Dance of The Sugar Plum Fairies? My silly sisters, that's who! Random good humored skits and jokes have been the source of many a good chuckle in my family. I'm lucky enough to live nearby some of my sisters. A few siblings however, have flew a little farther from the nest and landed out-of-state. After we've all been together for the holidays, I tend to go through sibling withdrawals missing their company. Cell phones and email help to bridge the gap of the miles between us but I'd like to do something more. I could send cookies, but cookies often break and crumble before reaching their destination. Better yet, I'll let them know I'm thinking of them by mailing something my Cricut and I have lovingly crafted with them in mind.

Happy Cricuting :-)

A: There are a variety of solutions to this issue. Many scrappers and crafters have had great results with Quickie Glue by Sakura. This adhesive can be found at your local craft store. The adhesive comes in a variety of pen dispensers. One of them is the size of a ballpoint pen so the application is very thin and is ideal for the width of those skinny letters! Don't forget to make use of the Cricut Tools when applying small letters and figures to your projects. Our tools were designed especially for this task.

I have no new personal adventure to share with you this week, so I am going to dive right into my second week exploring the Sesame Street Font cartridge. This cartridge is so cute and is a wonderful addition to the Cricut cartridge family. As a review, the six creative features that come with this cartridge are: Layer Non-shift/Layer shift, Sunny Day, Blackboard, shapes, Shadow, and Sunny Day Shadow. Last week I talked about what was in the cartridge and the shadow feature, this week I will explore one of the creative features.

This week I played around with the Blackboard feature. This font set is a wonderful addition to this cartridge because the letters are a nice blocky shape with a smooth edge, easy to read, and will make wonderful titles or use on a teacher's bulletin board. With this feature, using the shift button gives you all the upper case letters in the alphabet; when you don't use the shift button you have the entire lower case alphabet. This is great because sometimes you want to have both upper and lower case letters in your titles. With this font, you also get the numbers and some symbols, you can access the symbols by using the shift button on your Cricut overlay. Along with the numbers and symbols you also get some shapes, like a circle, square, triangle, and a star. The rest of what comes with this feature are images. These images are: a blackboard with lines (blank), a blackboard with lines with the ABC's shown, a blackboard with numbers, a blackboard with an apple, a blackboard with shapes, a blackboard with a flower, and a blackboard with three flowers. You also get an image with leaves, and crayons. All of these images come with their complimentary shape, so you can cut out the individual image and layer it on the blackboard.

Many of these images will look great on a scrapbook page, or decorating a child's wall with the Cricut vinyl. I wonder can I decorate my craft room with Sesame Street images and get away with it? Hummmm, that is something to think about.

Check back next week as I continue exploring the Sesame Street Font cartridge and share with you what I have discovered. Happy Cricuting!

Crafty Kimber

A: Turn off your Real Dial Size (the button right above your Shift Lock key). The cartridges are designed to cut each letter and shape in proportion to everything else on the cartridge (this is why the lowercase letters cut out in proportion to the uppercase letters and top layers cut out to complement the bottom layer). This is particularly evident on font cartridges like Opposites Attract and Jasmine, and shape cartridges like Animal Kingdom and Disney's Mickey and Friends. The Real Dial Size button overrides this default so that each character will cut out at exactly the height of inches set on the size dial. Sometimes this is called for, others it causes the distortion you are describing.