CARTRIDGE EXPLORATION
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Now to focus on getting ready for Christmas – one of my favorite memories of Christmas was opening the little doors of our chocolate Advent Calendar. This got me thinking that it was about time I created another advent calendar for my roommates and I to use this year. I started doing some research on the web to gather ideas for advent calendars. I found many ideas and I thought I would share them with you. The ideas that I found are using stockings and pinning them to a ribbon with clothespins, envelopes with numbers and pinning them to a ribbon or a string with clothespins. For dog lovers, I found a shape of a dog bone in felt that had dog treats pinned to the felt – one for each day counting down to Christmas. Other ideas include using flour sack bags that have numbers on them for the count down, and someone took a glass jar and created a sign on the outside for the countdown to Christmas and placed strips of paper to take out for each day. I have found vintage cards with numbers on one side and letters on the other that are attached to a ribbon, and then each card is flipped over to create a word as you count down to Christmas. For my craft project this week, I created my own advent calendar and added my own touch of style.
This week I explored the Something to Celebrate and Sweater Weather cartridges. When I first saw “Sweater Weather” the artwork is kind of an old computer Dos system style and I wasn’t sure what or how to feel about this, but as I explored and cut images for my calendar I fell more and more in love with this cartridge. This cartridge comes with one creative feature, which is a Font that includes numbers and letters plus the shadow layers. Also included with the feature are nine fun cards and an envelope that fits each of these cards. For my advent calendar, I used burlap for the background and cut out 4.5 x 5” dark green pocks, which I hand sewed to the burlap with cream embroidery floss (see photo). Then I cut the cards from “Sweater Weather” to use as my base for Christmas decorating and to place the numbers (see photo). Some of the images that come with this cartridge are reindeers, Christmas tree, bow, stocking, mittens, present, snowman, candy cane, snowflakes, ice skating, bell, Poinsetta, heart, rocking horse, and birds. Each of these images also has a layer feature that is available by using the shift key. Along with the font and images, you can also cut out ten different borders that use snowflakes, hearts, trees, presents, bows, and then four Christmas patterns images. You can do so much with this cartridge if you haven’t picked one up then I would suggest you grab one when you see it. I love this style..
“Something to Celebrate” is another great full cartridge that comes with six creative features and is the perfect birthday collection cartridge. The reason I say that is because you can cut cards, numbers, letters, phrases, banners, and boxes. The six creative features are Layer, Shadow/Card, Font 1, Font 2, Font Card, and Décor. Using the Font 1 and 2 features you can cut out single numbers (1,2,3 etc.) but now you can also cut out double numbers as well (14, 16, 18 etc.) and you can also cut numbers like  30, 40, 50 and 60 for those fun older birthdays. Some of the images that you can cut from “Something to Celebrate” are crowns, cupcakes, candles, horse, balloons, lanterns, streamers, triangle banner, pinwheel, fireworks, party hat, pennant, trophy, candy, pie, cake, stork, baby, boy and girl. The phrases that come with this cartridge are “join us”, “Celebrate”, “Way to go”, “Party Time”, “it’s your day”, “happy for you”, “how exciting”, and “happy birthday”.
The Décor provides you with ten different banner shapes, ten 3-D boxes, five long slim cards, five tags, five cupcake holders, and bows and flowers that can be folded into a 3-D shape. Since I was creating an advent calendar, I chose to use the present images and numbers from this cartridge but cut them with Christmas paper. Any of the 3-D boxes in this collection would make a great and easy advent calendar, you could even figure out how to hang some of them on twine or ribbon like a banner to help the calendar stand out and make it fun to use. Place candy, printed Christmas stories, Christmas poems, and or small presents in the boxes so as you open them up each day the whole family get s surprise. My advent calendar is still not completely finished. I plan on cutting out the tags in this cartridge from material and then using them to attach my Christmas stories and poems to. I still need to buy the presents and candy to place inside each of the pockets, but I think I will also add some days of service as well. The banner shapes cut smaller will work great for writing my notes and other actives on. This is a fun great birthday cartridge and I would suggest you add this to your Christmas list (if you are like me I put cartridges on my Christmas list).
I have given myself a week to wrap up my Advent calendar and then I plan on making one for my dogs, they will love getting a treat every day – I think I spoil them way too much, lol. I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I have had exploring these two cartridges. Get started now if you want to create your own advent calendar, it’s really easy and can be as expensive as you want it to be. Happy Holidays and good luck on those craft projects.
- Crafty Kimber
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