Decorating Christmas

Right now I'm working on a Christmas shadow box that on Sunday I'll be teaching to a group of teenagers. It's not ready yet, though, so instead I've got a smaller, less shadowy frame to show you.

It's a simple, cheap, wooden Ikea number, painted in a matte green. I cut a lot of trees using the Cricut, and I messed around in Inkscape for ages making the beautiful jumping deer (also eventually cut using the Cricut). Then I stuck everything together.

Simple, but quite cute, I think.

Sneak Peek: Door Hangers for Kids

This weekend my crafty friend Chocodeline and I will be giving a craft class to some kids - all of whom are under 9 and most of whom are under 6. We might be a little crazy... actually, I know that at least one of them is a very talented blossoming young artist - my fiance's 7-year-old niece. So it shouldn't be a problem getting them to create.

But what should we do? We settled on door hangers, which are personalisable and provide a large (but not too large!) enough canvas for the kids to decorate.

Here is the example I have created quickly from scraps and leftovers. Chocodeline kindly painted it (check out her awesome style in the pic lower down):

I used up shapes to make animals, the theme we're going to work with:

And used up some spare Cricut shapes:

And this is the awesome paint job by Chocodeline. She said she did what she thought a child would do, but I think it looks very stylish :-)

So, here's looking forward to Saturday's class... it is taking place in the afternoon, after an early morning trip to a craft show, don't you know!

Oh, Cindy Lou

There's a SWEET new Cricut cartridge out called 'Cindy Loo', which in my opinion has the most usable shapes of any cartridge they've released. C'mon, it even has cupcake wrappers! I don't own the cartridge, but my mum does, and she let me use it when we were visiting the UK the other week. As ever, time slips away and Cricut time was limited in the end to one afternoon. There was so much more I wanted to cut! The mushrooms, the birdhouses, the russian dolls... but I did manage to take away a few shapes, and this is what I did with them.

I cut a wreath - the one with trees, a squirrel and a deer - in the biggest size possible (with the Cricut Expression's 'Fit to Page' feature this was 11.5 inches), in green. I also cut another two, the same size, in grey and pink. I used Bazzill cardstock for all of them. I can't show you what things look like at this point because the picture I took is way too blurry.

Anyway, I cut certain parts from the grey wreath - the tree branches -and certain parts from the pink wreath - the tree leaves - and stuck the pieces onto the green wreath:


I then cut the squirrel and the deer shapes from one of the 'spare' wreaths:


And I traced the outlines of the shapes onto the back of some patterned paper I had left over and cut them out:


After sticking those shapes in place, I hand-cut some butterflies from some other patterned paper scraps, and stuck them in place:


And the finished article (finished apart from a few small gems, some ribbon and a place to hang it):


How cute is that? There are so many possibilities with this cartridge, I'd love to own it myself!

Craft Classes: Prep, Prep, Prep!

Hello all! As I mentioned a few posts ago I'm giving some craft classes next week as part of a summer school. I've found out now my class will consists of 8 girls (yay - makes things much easier!) from 12 to 14. I've been toiling away putting their kits together and reckon (fingers crossed) I'll just about have them all ready on time:


I've been cutting the paper (from Toga's du Papier à Gogo collection) into squares ready for our project:

I've also used the Cricut ALOT and cut out various shapes (tags and arrows are shown here) and a set of alphas for each girl (MUCH cheaper than buying them!).


I'm off to make the test run project now, then back to prep, prep, prep tomorrow!