In many communities, the trendy, practical, and safe Trunk or Treat is speedily replacing Trick or Treat. This is what happens when a group of neighbors, friends, or associates gathers at a predetermined location such as a parking lot of a school, church, or business, and circles the wagons so their children can go from vehicle to vehicle gathering Halloween treats. In such an environment, parents are not only able to keep an eye on the where-abouts of their little goblins, princesses, and pumpkins, but are able to monitor their children’s behavior and playful antics as well.

The Trunk or Treat circle of cars, SUV's and assorted vehicles, is also a great environment to capture some fun and delightful memories with your camera. After all, it's not all that often that family, friends, and neighbors gather together for the sole purpose of getting their children loaded up on candy. Now that's something to scrap about.

This weeks Tips Treasure Chest is back by popular demand. Many thanks to message board member Bunnylover for sharing her clever tip with us.

I was having a VERY quiet day and thought I'd play around with the shapes on George and see if I could make our cute little bug friend....and here's the result with instructions

Head: 4" Oval
Smile: 2" moon silhouette
Eyes: 2" circles (white) and 2" circles w/shadow (green)
Eyeballs: 1" sign w/circle
Feelers: 4" circle silhouette and 4" oval silhouette
Feeler ends: 1 1/2" sign w/circle

For the smile and feelers you need to fiddle a bit getting the right length but I found it easy when looking at the picture on my machine. The lettering underneath is Base Camp

This week I have been getting ready for my annual Halloween party, where everyone gets together to see how the grandchildren (my nieces & nephews) have dressed up for Halloween. I have been stressing out all week about what to do for the dinner, and what games should plan. Then it dawned on me, while I was stressing, that I had my Cricut! And this little bug could do everything I wanted. This week I'll show you what I did for my party using the Cricut. My first instinct was to grab all the Circuit cartridges and look through them to see what images I could use for my games, decorations, and food. That's when I realized that the images on the back of the cartridges are so small so I went to the web page www.cricut.com and looked at the images of cartridges on line. It was here that I found a few Halloween images on "Doodlecharms" and I could make the leaves work for my projects from "Speaking of Fall". Most of the ideas for my decorations came from flipping through a magazine that I had borrowed from a friend. But after each idea that I really liked I thought to myself, "Hey, I can use my Cricut to do that" so that is where my inspiration came from.

My first idea was to create a treat bowl with a pumpkin. I cut the letters from Base camp and laid them on the pumpkin then traced the word "treats" with a pen before I took my knife and started carving out the letters. Since I've been a Beta tester of the new Cricut Design Studio, (which is coming sometime in December) I decided to use the software and create a welded word (see pictures).Of course the first step in carving a pumpkin is to cut the top off and to clean the inside out, but crazy me I carved the pumpkin first because I was so excited to see my design and then cleaned the inside of the pumpkin out. I only cut about a 1/8 of an inch into the outside of the pumpkin; I didn't cut the letters the whole way through. Then you use a flower pot to go inside of the pumpkin (this holds the candy) and you wrap Christmas lights around the bottom of the flower pot before you put the flower pot into the pumpkin so that the letters to the word "treats" stand out. This was really fun to make and will look great on my buffet table for a center piece.

Another idea for a center piece is to use the "Speaking of Fall" cartridge and cut out the leaves. You may have to separate a few but could also you use the layers feature to get the individual letters. Then you take a tall hurricane or glass cylinder, wrap a layer of vellum around the glass object, and trim the vellum to fit the object. Then you place the leaves around the glass cylinder using a glue stick to place the leaves, and then wrap another layer of vellum around the cylinder. Place a candle in the cylinder and WOW you have a nice soft glow for your table. This is the last project I have to finish for my table, I ran out of vellum in my scrapbook room- that bites. I will have this ready for my buffet table to set off my party.

Another idea is using the spider from "Doodlecharms" to decorate a lampshade (see pic). I used my Cricut expressions and the mode Auto Fill to have the machine cut a bunch of spiders. Then I taped them to the inside of a white lampshade, turned off the lights and checked out my project. It was so cool to see the spiders reflected on the shade. Another idea was to use the pumpkin from the same cartridge, use it as a template and carve oranges like you would carve pumpkins. You first cut off the top of the orange then clean out the orange. My roommate helped me with this project and boy was it messy, it's a good thing that I didn't have any cuts on my hands, because they would have stung from the orange juice getting all over my hands. Once the inside of the orange is cleaned out, then you carve your orange with the face , put orange sherbet or orange ice-cream inside, place the top on top of the sherbet and I have a cute dessert for my dinner party.

You can use any Halloween image from the Cricut as a template to make stencils for your cookies. You use any sort of a sanding sugar any color and sift over the template. This looks great with letters as well as images. The Cricut can do almost anything that you want as long as you have the cartridges with the images. Cricut images can also be used to create shadows on your walls by using a small candle votive and holder, wire and your image. I used a pumpkin, taped some stiff wire to my images, taped the wire to the bottom of the candle then place the candle near my fire place to create a pumpkin shadow on the wall. It looks so cool. I did all this within 4 hours to get ready for my party, thanks to my Cricut everything went off very smoothly and my family will be very surprised by my decorations.

That’s all for this exploration, check out next week and see what you will discover on using your Cricut.

Crafty Kimber

A. To set an avatar go to your profile page and scroll down to the "Avatar" section. There are three options here:
1) Upload your own picture or symbol to be used as your avatar.
2) Choose a premade avatar from the cricut website.
3) Choose not to display an avatar. After you have selected the option you like, scroll down and select the OK button.