New Cartridges and some Digital Fun

Yesterday was Hello Thursday - the day when new Cricut cartridges are announced.  This month there are 13 cartridges and you can view them all by visiting the Hello Thursday page on Cricut.com.  Just click on the colorful cartridges on the shelves to pull up the "Look Book" for each cartridge.

Santa's Village, Christmas Wish and Floral Emporium are all Cricut Imagine cartridges.

Santa's Village contains traditional holiday images and papers.  There are gift tags, candy wrappers, coloring pages and labels and bags for food gifts in addition to all of the houses, elves, reindeer, etc.

Christmas Wish is a pattern and colors cartridge with more non-traditional colors (pink, aqua and light green).  The cartridge is designed by Sheri Berry (Sheri McCulley Seibold) and very similar in style to her Snow Angel cartridge from last year.  If you'd like to read more about Sheri and her designs you can find her website HERE.

Floral Emporium is also a patterns and colors cartridge with 20 pretty floral designs in pinks, greens, reds and blues.  These florals were designed by Lily Ashbury and you can find her website HERE.

There are six full size cartridges, Noah's ABC Animals, Ribbons and Rosettes, New Testament, Go Canada, Paper Trimmings and 'Tis the Season.

Noah's ABC Animals has 3D versions of the animals and the ark that you can assemble.  They are done in the "sliceform" style - made of intersecting layers of flat cuts (you'll be able to see this in the "look book").  They can also be cut as flat images and there are names and sounds for the animals, along with a font.  This cartridge, along with the New Testament cartridge will make all of the people who have been asking for a religious cartridge quite happy.  New Testament has biblical figures, crosses, Bible verses and more and will be great for church projects and bulletin boards. 

Go Canada is a cartridge full of Canadian images, including igloos and hockey skates, province and territory shapes, lots of welded words and phrases (some in French) and a font inside a maple leaf shape.  I am happy to see that all of the Canadian Cricut fans now have a cartridge to help with their projects.

Ribbons and Rosettes is full of borders and sections of borders that can be accordian folded and made into rosettes.  There are medallions for the centers of the rosettes as well.  There are even rhinestone border templates and a rhinestone alphabet.

Paper Trimmings is exclusive to the Cricut Circle and is another cartridge full of medallions, corners, frames and borders.  There are some nice holiday images.  If you join the Circle for the next quarter, you may not receive this cartridge.  Starting with the new memberships for the second year, members received the welcome packet with French Manor as their first cartridge.  I am not sure if this will continue throughout this year but you would want to check before signing up if your goal was to receive the Paper Trimmings cartridge.

'Tis the Season is the latest Creative Memories exclusive cartridge.  I don't care much for the colors that were used in the Look Book for the sample cuts - try to focus on the nice images and lovely word art when you look at this one.  There are also two fonts, snowflakes (!), and two medallion shapes with letter cutouts for monograms.  I have already ordered my copy through the sampling program and this cartridge will be available to order on my CM personal website on November 1st.

There are three Cricut Lite cartridges, Fast Food, Pet Shop and Sweater Weather.

Fast Food and Pet Shop are pretty self explanatory - lots of images of fast food and pets!

Sweater Weather includes images that are made up of squares - like you would find in a knitting pattern or cross-stitch chart.  They have a "pixelated" look which may not appeal to everyone.

The last cartridge, Stencil, is a Project Cartridge and has cuts that create stencils.  Some of the images look like they are from earlier cartridges.  You can make stencils of many Cricut cuts by hiding the outer line of the design with one of the software options, but I suppose this cartridge makes it quick and easy if you want to stencil something.

Some of the new cartridges are already available to order on the Cricut.com site.  You can see projects made with them on the Official Cricut Blog.  The Hello Thursday Bloggers will also be showing projects over the next week or so - click to visit Joy, Melanie, Tammy, Mixology.

If you hover your mouse over the tiny white boxes on the shelves on the Hello Thursday page, you will see that eight cartridges have been added to the retiring list. They are:

Billionaire
Block Party
Chore Chart
Handyman
Lovely Floral
Savory
Slumber Party
Splish Splash

Some of these have been available on Cricut Rewards for 500 points if you are interested in adding them to your collection.

These snowflake pages should look a bit familiar - I made them by taking a clear photo of the snowflake medallion I created for yesterday's card, bringing it in to my Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 4.0 software, deleting the background and creating a .png file and then using my new digital file in various sizes and degrees of opacity on a 12 x 12 page.  I used a couple of different gradient backgrounds and turned the group of snowflakes in different directions.

I have done this with other assembled cuts and designs - it gives me even more options for making personalized pages and projects - and it is fun to do!  You can read more about the program on my Creative Memories personal website HERE.  If you have any questions about the software or how I made these papers just send along a comment or an email and I'll explain further. 


I'd love to know what you think of the latest release - which cartridges do you think you "have to have"? 

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