Time to break the piggy bank!

I was eagerly waiting for the Design Studio to be updated to add A Child's Year so I could weld the font - I really like the style of the letters. A Child's Year was added today, along with a group of cartridges that are brand new and very exciting. Here is a LINK to the Cricut Message Board announcement about the update where you will find a link to the download page. If you are not sure about how to download and install the new cartridge information, you can see the great step by step explanation that Jen just posted on our "Let me Show You How To Do That" teaching blog - here is a LINK to the post (Thanks Jen!).

The six new "surprise" cartridges are Everyday Paper Dolls, From My Kitchen, Picturesque, Serenade, Sweethearts and Winter Woodland - and they all look terrific!

All of the cartridges except Serenade are full cartridges. Serenade is a solutions cartridge with charming birds, flowers, trees and even birdcages!

I thought that Sweethearts was a solutions cartridge at first glance because the virtual keypad only shows two feature keys



I noticed the the keys were not in the usual position for Solutions cartridges so I checked the features menu and found out that it is a full cartridge with shadow, blackout, layers, tags, cards and envelopes. There is a glitch in the way the keypad appears in the program, but if you click where the feature key should be the images show up.



Here are a few tags,



and some of the layers - won't it be fun to decorate that cake!



Here are a few envelopes,



and some cards.

The cartridge is is full of romantic and cute images suitable for weddings, anniversaries, Valentine's Day, and so on. There are some nice flourishes and lots of welded phrases. There is even a bicycle built for two!

I previewed all of the images in regular and shift and took screen shots to share with you - I'll try to do this for some more of the cartridges too. Take a look and enjoy!



























I imagine most people who read my blog have Design Studio since I spend so much of my time creating with it, sharing my designs, and trying to help other people learn some of the quirks of the program that I have discovered through trial and error.

However, if you don't have Design Studio yet, you owe it to yourself to at least download the trial version so you can take a look at all of the exciting new cartridges. Remember, with the trial version you can design with everything but can only cut with your machine's "native" cartridges (George for the Personal, Don Juan for the Create and Plantin Schoolbook and Accent Essentials for the Expression).

Once you have done some experimenting with the trial version and see how many interesting and exciting possibilities are open to you when you use the software you will discover that you do "need" to add Design Studio to your crafting tools!

The font in the screen shot at the top of this post is from Winter Woodland and the butterfly is from Picturesque. I know I need to start calculating which of these new cartridges will go to the top of my wish list - I will want to get them all - it's just a question of which ones will come first! I have no idea if these are going to be available soon or if the release was a "teaser" and it will be a while until they are available to purchase. But it will be fun to work with the images and I can even have a lot of things designed so I will be ready to go when the cartridges do become available.