It's been awhile.

It's been awhile since I last posted.  I have to say I have not been in a good state of mind.  My oldest brother lost his battle with cancer and that was very upsetting.  I hope to get back on track.

I am so happy today. I love all my Cricut machines, baby bug, cake, expression, expression2, imagine, and my explore. I love my gypsy for taking to crops. 2 years ago I took my baby bug to a crop along with my gypsy. With the previous gypsy update my baby bug would not work with my gypsy, it would make one cut then stop and say it was not connected. I am going crafting this afternoon and did not want to take one of the bigger machines, and there is no internet access where I'm going, so I picked about ten carts to take with me. I had done my gypsy update earlier this month and decided to see if it worked with my gypsy. It now does, I'm so so so happy about this. My baby bug is the machine I prefer to travel with, I love the travel case, you can get everything you need into it other than the paper, so it is easy, and has wheels. I do wish they would make this type of travel bag for the other machines.

Cookies for Santa Plates

I have not been posting a lot lately.  I have taken several pictures of my completed projects, so I thought it might be time to catch up.  Every year I make a Christmas gift for everyone in my office, this year I made plates for the Santa.  These were fast and easy to make and quite inexpensive.  I purchased the plates at the Dollar Store and the vinyl from Dessers.

90th Birthday

This past Saturday I attended a 90th birthday party.  90 years is quite a milestone don't you think!  The person turning 90 is a male, male cards are so hard for me to do.  I decided to keep it simple.  I used a white card base, then a piece of brown Michaels Cardstock.  I stamped with with My Pink Stamper's Texas Chocolate brown ink.  I then picked a couple of scrap designer paper I had lying around and just glued them together.  I wrapped bakers twine around this bottom of this.  I then used Stampin Up's create a brad and cut two circles to make the brad (I find they top layers of these brads don't stick well so I used glossy accents to hold them together.  I then turned to my Cricut Explore and made the Happy 90th Birthday.  This is certainly not the best card I've made but I'm happy with the results.

How to make your own embossing templates!!

This technique is so much easier than the one I use.  I never thought of using the rubber pad.  Must try this her results look amazing.  I'm thinking the Edge to Edge cartridge will be perfect for this.

Costco and my Cricut Imagine

A few weeks ago I was working on a scrapbooking project where I was using my cricut imagine to print some paper.  It was a double layout, and the first page of paper printed well, but the second had streaks and lines in it.  I did a cleaning of the print heads via the machine and that did not help.  I figured I needed new ink.  I have been pricing the ink at Staples, Walmart etc and found the best price of $65.00 for a colour cartridge.  While playing online one day I found that Costco refills original ink cartridges, and it does so for between $9 and $12 dollars, I checked to make sure my ink could be refilled, and it could.  Well today my husband had to go to Costco so I asked him to take my cartridge and have it refilled.  The clerk told my husband to just clean the print heads with a clorox wipe and clean the resevoir.  He said that my cartridge had over 70% ink still.  Well, I came home and did just that, I am so happy with the results.  I wanted to share because this has saved me a ton of $$.
After cleaning.

This is what came off the cartridge and the resevoir.

 

I hope this post saves people some money.

Rachel and Anas birthday cards

Ana and Rachel celebrated birthdays today.  Chris and Ana went out to dinner with her family, and my friend Rachel who is alone came to my house for a bbq.  I made the same card for each of them.

V-day treat boxes

Here are some of the treat boxes I made for my family, friends and co-workers.  I made 24.  The boxes are cut from tags bags boxes and more, the valentine borders are cut from Holiday Cakes.