Cheerful Seasons and Reminisce Accents (cartridge review)

My two new Creative Memories exclusive cartridges arrived today.  I thought I'd share a little more information about these cartridges for those of you who are interested.  I haven't been able to do trial cuts yet but hope to do that tomorrow.  I am including some images from the new Fall/Winter Creative Memories catalog that I scanned to show you how some of the images look when assembled.  You can click on the images to see them in a larger size.

The cartridges are packaged in the same sort of plastic box as the Cricut Lite cartridges.  They are full cartridges with few "empty spaces."  The shift levels on two of the Reminisce Accents keypads are empty (Frame Shadow and Shadow) and there are 12 blank keys (regular and shift) on the Monogram keypad.  Cheerful Seasons has only 28 keys with no shift function.

Each cartridge comes with a Cricut Rewards certificate for 90 points.

Cheerful Seasons is primarily a font cartridge with a Basic Font and Shadow, the Cheerful Font and Shadow and the Cheerful Shapes Font, which is the Cheerful Font inside of shapes (ovals, squares, circles, triangles).  The Basic font is a traditional font, very similar to Plantin Schoolbook or Base Camp.  The Cheerful font is a "mixed up" font which includes many different styles (the same idea as the fonts on Mini Monograms or Printing Press).

There is some nice word art and a variety of useful titles on Cheerful Seasons with phrases for each season along with the names of the seasons.  The main images on the cartridge usually have shadows and two or three layers.  As you would expect from the name of the cartridge, the images give a good representation of the seasons and holidays through the year.  The first four rows are images for Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter and there are some swirls and flourishes on the final row.  The style of the images is fairly realistic - not too "cutesy" but lighthearted and fun.

I would consider this a good "starter cartridge" for someone who does not have many Cricut cartridges.  The content is similar to fonts and images found on some other cartridges.  There are some images that I really like such as the soft serve ice cream cone, the rain boot, the watermelon slices, the snail,  some of the stylized flowers, the bushel basket of apples, the wheelbarrow full of leaves, maple and oak leaves and the wreath, sled, snowman and snowflake.

The Reminisce Accents cartridge is a bit more unique.  It has one font, the Elegant Font, with upper and lower case but no shadow and two styles of monograms.  The Elegant font is an old-fashioned script font and is similar in feel to the font on the Heritage cartridge.  The base cartridge images include all sorts of elegant flowers, medallions and flourishes with shadows.  There are some lovely titles that are particularly appropriate for scrapbook pages.  There is no shadow feature for the titles.

My favorite parts of the Reminisce Accents cartridge are the border function with lots of interesting designs that have a shadow or base layer and the frames.  The layered frames are similar to those found on the Lacy Labels Lite cartridge and will be great for cards and journal boxes on scrapbook pages.  A lot of the shapes are very intricate and I will be testing them to see the smallest sizes that will cut cleanly.

The possibilities of both cartridges will be expanded once they are added to Design Studio and the Gypsy.  I think Reminisce Accents will be great for welding the borders and making interesting shaped cards.  I am guessing that the updates might come with the next "Hello Thursday" which should be August 19th.

If I could only buy one of the cartridges, it would probably be Reminisce Accents but this is a matter of personal taste and opinion.  I am excited about using these cartridges along with the coordinating digital content that I have already installed in my StoryBook Creator Plus 3.0 program.  (you can see a bit more about that in THIS POST).

These cartridges are available to order exclusively through a Creative Memories consultant.  I am a consultant and, if you do not currently have a consultant, I would be happy to help you with your order.  You can order directly from my Creative Memories site - here is a LINK to my site.

This LINK will take you to the page on my Creative Memories personal website for the Cheerful Seasons cartridge which coordinates with the Cheerful Seasons Power Palette.   This LINK will take you to the page on my CM site for the Reminisce Accents cartridge which coordinates with the Reminisce Power Palette.

Edited to add links to the full cartridge handbooks.

You can see the Cheerful Seasons cartridge handbook HERE .


You can see the Reminisce Accents cartridge handbook HERE.

I'll try to get a few projects made tomorrow - I have had some "real-life" things to deal with the past few days and my fingers are itching to get to my craft room and make things!

The photo at the top of this post is of a crape myrtle tree in front of the home of our friends in Charlotte, North Carolina.  I really enjoyed seeing these colorful trees  everywhere!

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