I have a confession to make. My Christmas tree has not been put away yet. It's fake, so there is no fire hazard at hand. The ornaments and decorations have been carefully removed and packed away but the artificial green remains in the corner keeping the piano company. It could be disassembled and packed away but has deliberately been kept out of the box for a special project in mind...Valentine's Day! Yes the day is a month away, but imagine how much fun it will be to spruce up the spruce with hearts and cupids in red, white, and pink! The nieces and nephews shall assist me and my Cricut pal with this one. While their parents get away to enjoy a well deserved Valentine's date, we'll bake and frost cookies and decorate the tree with a plethora of hearts from Cricut Cartridges!

Happy Cricuting :-)

A: Cricut Tool Kit

By Provo Craft. The Cricut tool kit has 7 great tools specially designed for use with the Cricut machine. Contents are:
- Scoop Tool (working much like a spoon to lift cut pieces from the mat)
- Knife Tool (a sharp edge for sliding under paper)
- Hook Tool (removes small circles of paper and cleans small holes)
- Scraper (scrapes off and cleans you entire mat from any leftover paper scraps)
- Bone Folder (scores paper, creases paper & marks paper)
- Scissors
- Clear Ruler
(All tools also sold separately. Click here.)

Cricut Spatula Tool

The Cricut Spatula Tool was developed from our users feedback and a great way to help you get your cuts off the mat.

Where does the time fly? It seems that it was just the other day that I was writing this exploration about something in one of the Cricut cartridges. Now, it's time to do it again, and I will do it again the following week. It's a good thing that I love to explore and write about what's new in the Cricut family. This week I want to wrap up the Sesame Street Font cartridge. As a review, because I never know who is going to starting reading this newsletter, the creative features are: Layer Non-Shift/Layer Shift, Sunny Day, Blackboard, Shapes, Shadow, and Sunny Day Shadow. In the previous newsletters I have discussed the Sunny Day font and Sunny Day Shadow, contents in the cartridge, and the blackboard feature.

In this article I will wrap up the last font that comes with this cartridge. The name of this font is Shapes. Yes, I am stating the obvious: the whole alphabet is enclosed with different shapes. You can cut upper and lowercase letters and the shapes you get are: circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, and ovals. Along with the alphabet, you also get numbers and some symbols--each of these are also surrounded with a shape. This type of style will fit any scrapbook page, side bar, or teacher's bulletin board at school. This font is a complement to the rest of the cartridge and will fit in wonderfully with the rest of the Cricut cartridges.

One of the exciting things that I want to point out: when I was exploring these features, in the category of extra images that are added to this cartridge, you can now have a border or shape for this image. To help make your design stand out, simply cut the image using the creative feature Sunny Day Shadow you can cut a shadow images that fits your image perfectly. This feature is for the Elmo face, Elmo reading a book, Elmo in a circle waiving, Elmo in a circle, Cookie Monster face, Cookie Monster eating cookies, Big Bird face, Big Bird clapping his hands, Big Bird in a circle. Wow! This is great. It's almost like getting an extra creative feature. YAHOOOO!

This wraps up the Sesame Street Font cartridge. Check back next week as I start writing about one of the new cartridges that have been added to the Cricut cartridge family. Happy Cricuting!

Crafty Kimber

A: When you are using DesignStudio, the only settings on the machine you need to touch are the blade pressure and the blade depth. Everything else is done in the DesignStudio program. The reason you are getting an error is because there is conflicting information in what the DesignStudio has been told to do and what the Cricut machine has been told to do. The mat that shows on your computer screen corresponds with the actual mat you load into your machine. If your paper is smaller than the mat, make sure that the position of the image you have created in the DesignStudio corresponds with where you have placed the paper on the mat. The rulers on the sides of the mats, both in the program and on you physical mat, can be very helpful here. In other words: wherever you place your image on the screen, is where the machine will cut real mat.