Back in the Craftroom...at last!

It has been such a busy summer.  With everything we have going on I haven't had time to make nearly as many projects as usual.  When I have some free time, I am not always home with my supplies.  So I have been doing a lot of designing on my computer and now I am finally getting a chance to turn those designs into finished projects.

If you are a long time follower of my blog, you know that I like to make cards with cut out designs.  I started years ago doing the aperture cards with initials welded in the opening with my Cricut machines and Design Studio.  I still make those types of designs by using "hide contour" to embed an image into a card front.  Over the years, many cartridges have come out that have designs using this technique (most recently, the A Quilted Christmas cartridge).

I have started to design my own shapes with the Silhouette Studio software.  I'd love to do this with the Cricut, however, it is much more difficult to create totally original designs.  You have to start with a shape on a cartridge and the options for aligning, shadowing and rotating your design are not as extensive as they are in the Silhouette program.

There are still lots of times when I use the Cricut because it is the fast and easy alternative, so I really do have a foot in both worlds.  I have found the Silhouette option for print and cut projects to be much better than the Imagine.  I like that I can use any digital papers or elements that I own and even create my own unique papers and images.  For a card that I made this weekend, I used the DeLovely collection from Cosmo Cricket.  I bought this while they were still selling their designs in digital format through Jessica Sprague.

I did pull out my Imagine for a little while this weekend and printed some full sheets of paper.  I have had only marginally acceptable results on most of the print and cut images that I want to cut "on the line" with the Imagine.  Maybe if I spend more time doing the advanced calibration again I'll be able to get better alignment.

In the meanwhile, I do like printing full sheets of 12 x 12 paper.  I have managed to collect quite a few Imagine cartridges and there are some very pretty papers available.  I do wish that I could unlock the machine so I could use it as a 12 x 12 printer to print my other digital papers.

Well, I got sidetracked by the Olympics and I have a early dentist appointment, so I'll have to share the finished card and details of how I made it on Monday.

I hope you had a great weekend!

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