Christmas Blessings ...

Some Christmas Cards ...

These are some of the Christmas cards I have made ... still have many to go ...

This was a card I made and when you lifted the lid it had a Starbuck's gift card attached:

This next one was just simple and sweet ...

The card below opens up and has a gift card holder on the top.

Have more projects to finish! Thanks for dropping by.

Keystone Scrap has done it again ...

Another super cute kit by Keystone Scraps is now available ...  this is perfect for those special Christmas moments.

Click here to go to Scraps N Pieces to purchase this great kit and click here to check out Keystone Scraps' blog to see all the fantastic layouts their creative team did. It will give you some wonderful ideas! Also, don't forget to sign up for their newsletter on the blog ... thanks for dropping by!

I'm Channeling my Angry Bird ...

I follow The Paper Boutique and just love her designs. Well, she usually has a Fab Five Friday and I get a kick out of going to all the blogs she highlights. I was floored when she had Designs by Sharon as part of her Fab Five Friday and I saw her Snowman Lanterns (her December 6th posting). Well, I was looking through her fabulous blog and found the most stinkin' cute things ...

Aren't these just precious! After reading that Sharon used the Cricut Sweet Tooth Boxes I just followed her pictures ... and, of course, broke out my game! I also used my Cricut Craft Room for the faces and embellishments. I plan on using them for treats at Christmas ... I think I'll finally "wow" my sons ... I mean who doesn't know and love the Angry Birds!

Thanks for dropping by!

Christmas Recipe Book

This is one of the projects I have been working on while learning Cricut Craft Room. It is another design by Laura Denison called the Leftovers Recipe Book/Mini Album. I made mine a recipe book for my favorite Christmas recipes. The papers and chipboard pieces are from Jolly by Golly by Cosmo Cricket. I've had these papers in my stash and was thrilled to finally use them. I used Cricut cartridge From My Kitchen for "Recipes" and I used my Slice Paws & Claws for "Favorites" and Spook Alley for the peppermints.

 This is the Cookies section and although the word Cookies doesn't show up real well here, you can actually make it out very well when looking at the book. I, again, used the From My Kitchen Cricut cartridge for "Cookies" and the gingerbread men. I also embossed the gingerbread cookies using a Cuttlebug Christmas tree embossing folder.

 This is how a recipe card looks in the section. They just slide in and come out very easily. It fits a 4x6 card perfectly!

This next section is "Candy" and I used the Cricut cartridge From My Kitchen for this too. I used the cartridge Joys of the Season for the peppermint candies and candy cane.

This last section is the "Pie" section also done with my From My Kitchen cartridge. I used the same cartridge for the pie shown there.

I just added this photo to show my most favorite feature of this recipe book! The bottom portion of the outer cover can "pop out" for that easel effect so you can prop the book up and read your recipes.

My Christmas Recipe Book really helped me learn Cricut Craft Room because I love using a shadow with items I cut and I was having a huge problem getting that to work. Of course, it was just a simple button I needed to push to get it to work ... duh ... but when you aren't familiar with the program it just takes a bit.

I hope you enjoyed seeing this and thanks for dropping by!

Busy, busy, busy ...

I have been so bad about posting on my blog lately. Some of you may notice that I am not on the Keystone Scraps Creative Team right now. I absolutely LOVE these ladies ... but with some serious family issues with my dad's health I felt it best to leave. I cannot say enough great things about Keystone Scraps and their talent and creative team, but I needed to give them 100% for all they do for us and didn't feel I could do that right now. 

I am slowly getting back in to some paper crafting and playing with my new toy ...

I got this right after we returned from our road trip to Birmingham ... and what an awesome trip it was ... I'll show pictures tomorrow from that trip. :)

Anyway, I have been getting to know my Cricut Expression 2 and trying to learn Cricut Craft Room. My first HUGE disappointment was that  the Expression 2 does NOT support Cricut Design Studio, which I used all the time. Anything I do with my Cricut was through Design Studio! It was my fault for not researching everything including compatibility between the E2 and Design Studio, but I assumed Provo Craft would have their products all compatible with the newer machines. My bad ...

I have been teaching myself Cricut Craft Room (which is free from www.cricut.com) and must say, as upset as I was about having to use something other than Design Studio, I do like alot of the things in Craft Room. I have put a lot of time in to learning this software and how it works with the E2 and my Gypsy. Most of  this has been through trial and error. The Cricut boards are great for finding answers too. I have also found some great tutorials on YouTube. The more I get used to using Craft Room the more I am liking it. There are some bugs they need to get ironed out though. I also like that I can take my ".cut" files from Design Studio and convert them to ".gypsy" files and then just use my Gypsy to cut from the E2. The E2 has WiFi capability, but I am not even going there cause I've seen so many problems with it right now. I am happy just using it with the cable. 

Hopefully I will soon have something to show for all my studying and playing around.