Bag Skirts–Part 2

The second bag skirt design is based on one of Penny Duncan’s “scallop” designs, with the slits cut for ribbon to be woven through. This one is using cutting only, and no drawing, on the machine. I took my colour scheme and design from Tim Holtz’s Christmas Tag No. 1 for this year – I love the subtle background of this one. I haven’t got any snowflake stamps or dies, but I used a swirl stamp all over to give a bit of texture.
I started by putting quite a bit of Picket Fence Distress Stain onto the centre of my non-stick craft sheet, and then added some Faded Jeans (more) and Chipped Sapphire (less) around the outside, so as not to contaminate the sponge dauber of the Picket Fence one with other colours. After spritzing the cardstock well with water, I smooshed it in this mixture till I was happy with the mottled, blended background. (That Picket Fence Distress Stain is awesome stuff! It will lighten any colour, and give a gorgeous faded chalky effect.)
After drying the inked paper with my heat gun, I proceeded to ink up my swirl stamp with Picket Fence Distress Stain and stamp all over the sheet, randomly. This distress stain tends to disappear, but not completely – the pattern is very subtle, as you can see from this picture (I do love to be able to stamp in white!):

After this, I spritzed a bit of water into my hand and flicked it all over the sheet, and then dried it again with the heat gun. this gives nice mottly spots as the water droplets wet the ink on the surface of the card and draw it into themselves.
I did another one I wasn’t quite so happy with:

- it was a bit too dark, with not enough Chipped Sapphire. I made another which was better, which I used to make the second bag skirt, and decided to reserve this one to make the tags for these bags, and for other purposes.
At this stage I had to iron the sheets because they’d gone a bit ripply and I didn’t think Jiminy Cricut would appreciate that. (He’s not behaving very well at the moment – he can see Sheba’s box across the room and he knows his days are numbered!!!) Even so, they were still a bit wrinkled, so I taped them down onto Jiminy’s mat with some masking tape just to make sure.
Here’s the first front piece I cut – I distressed the edges with my lovely new Distress Ink in the seasonal set – it’s Iced Spruce (what a gorgeous name!) – the colour is fabulous, really subtle. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up very well in the photo, but in reality there’s a lovely soft green around the edges.

I’m really annoyed with Jiminy. He is sooo inaccurate! My second piece didn’t cut right – the mat loaded further to the right than on my original piece, so that he cut off all the scallops along the bottom of the piece!!

I have cut around each shape with scissors, and I think it looks more or less OK, as long as you don’t look too closely, and as long as it isn’t up against the first piece!!

Also, if you look closely, the holes along the edge are slightly skewed off centre – they are NOT like this in my drawing! (Can’t WAIT to get Sheba up and running…)

In my drawing, all the holes are perfectly symmetrical:

Because it’s very hard to get two identical backgrounds made by the smooshing method, I decided to make the backs of these bag skirts from plain blue cardstock distressed with Iced Spruce Distress Ink –  it’s quite acceptable to have the backs plain, I think. Penny makes her bag skirts all in one piece – it’s not clear from her pictures how big they are, but to make one for a 12 inch-width bag, you can’t cut a big enough piece of card (at least, I can’t – I’ve only got 12 x 12 and a 12 inch cutter). I have redrawn the piece so that there is a front and a back piece, with an overlap on the back. Because I didn’t have any 12 x 12 white card, I used A4 for the front, which is only just big enough, hence the critical placing of the mat to ensure the whole thing is cut properly. (Why isn’t anything ever straightforward?)
Here are the two bag skirt pieces completed, waiting for their embellishments.

You can see the slit for the bag handles. The Iced Spruce Distress Ink around the edges doesn’t show up very well in this photo, and the lower one is actually darker in colour and less white-looking, but the swirls on the top one show up very nicely!
I drew some foliage pieces and pine cone spiral shapes (adapted from flower spirals) based on Tim Holtz’s shapes, and as a dummy run, cut them in plain white card. I wanted to practise making the pine cones as I had not done this before – on his video, Tim shows how to do this with hot glue around a cocktail stick. My first attempt was a disaster and went straight in the bin, but then I thought you might like a good laugh so I rescued it and photographed it.

Horrible, isn’t it.
However, with a bit of practice, I got it right. I’m very pleased with the pine cones. If you do them in any colour not brown, they start to look like flowers (like other spiral-constructed flowers). Here’s the mock-up with the pine cones and all the foliage pieces cut in white card.

It shows up a lot better with different shades of green and brown, and also when the leaf pieces are manipulated a bit to make them more three-dimensional.
As a little aside, in the past, when I was well enough to cook, I have made spiral “roses” out of the skin of tomatoes peeled off in a continuous spiral with a very sharp paring knife, and then rolling them, as a garnish – they always got a very positive reaction! This technique works so well!

Note also the little fish on the smoked salmon timbale, cut from slices of cucumber, each with an eye created from a tiny piece of ground black peppercorn! I used the same spiral technique for the gold ribbon rose on the napkin design – I pulled up the wire along one edge which ruched the ribbon, and then rolled it up to form the rose.
However, I digress… (my friends tell me I’m good at that!!)
I designed a sentiment in Serif DrawPlus, “With Love” on a curving swirl, using Wedding Text font, which I am quite pleased with. I cut this in white card and then added a nice thick spreading of PVA glue and some glitter. I’ve uploaded this cut file to my SkyDrive (link in my sidebar – all free downloads). After it was dry, some of the glitter did come off; PVA may not be the best glue. Could someone who uses glitter a lot please tell me the correct glue for glitter?

I had originally intended simply scaling the whole bag skirt in this design down to fit smaller bags, but Jiminy Cricut struggles to do intricate cuts, so until I’ve got Sheba up and running, I’ve decided to do them all the same size, and simply cut down the sides to fit.
This the ribbon I used to thread through the bag skirt –  just a few scrap lengths I’ve had in my box for ages. It’s got wired edges.

These are the  the swirls and pine cones cut from the Kraft-Core paper (No. 21, a nice rich dark brown).

Here are the completed pine cones before I cut the cocktail sticks off.

Inking them with a bit of Vintage Photo Distress Ink to make a bit of shadow, and then adding some Snow Cap Acrylic Dabber, the white paint immediately went yellow! So much for snow. It did get a bit whiter when it dried, though. I think the answer would be to seal the surface first with a spray varnish before adding the white paint. I also added some Rock Candy Distress Stickles for a bit of “frost.” I love these pine cones! They even make the right sound when you handle them – that sort of hollow crisp rustling that real ones make! I almost expected them to shed seeds all over my work surface!
Here is one of the bag skirts with the swirls and sentiment added. These were stuck down with Crafter’s Companion Stick & Stay – I like spray adhesives for sticking down intricate shapes as it saves a lot of hassle, you get good adhesion and no mess. I have pretty well finished my spray photo-mount and prefer the Stick & Stay as it doesn’t have that awful smell. When it was dry, however, I did find that the pieces were starting to lift – I think I need to spray it on more thickly than my original photo-mount spray adhesive.

Next step was to cut the foliage. In his instructions, Tim advises sanding the pieces before removing them from the die, so after I had cut my pieces (I did the same for the swirls and pine cones) I sanded them before removing them from the Cricut mat – this made it much easier to distress the intricate pieces as they were supported, and also, you get a tiny raised edge where the cut has been made, and this sands really nicely, giving the pieces added definition. Here they are after I had hand embossed them onto a piece of fun foam.

For the two different kinds of coniferous leaves and the holly, I used three different shades of Kraft-Core: Nos. 10 and 12 for the coniferous leaves and No. 11 for the holly. I darkened the latter with some Forest Moss Distress Ink and picked out the veins with a marker pen. Some variegation was added when I sanded the pieces, and I’ve also added some Snow Cap Paint Dabber on the the coniferous leaves. The leaves were manipulated a bit to give them a little dimension and make them look more realistic.

Arranging the various bits and pieces over the swirls, I attached them using hot glue. I hope I’ve achieved a nice wintery effect with this bag skirt! The brown of the swirls and pine cones echoes the colour of the bag.

Here are some detail photos of the various elements on the completed bag skirt.


(This photo unfortunately shows up all the hot glue strings that I failed to remove from the pine cones!!)


This final photo shows the back of the bag skirt, complete with its tag cut from the background sheet that I created and wasn’t so pleased with; I wrote the names with a glitter gel pen on the Cricut using Wedding Text font, and then cut the tag on the Cricut, as I did for the drawing and text on the poinsettias bag skirts.

This is the video I have made about the bag skirts

Final notes on the bag skirts:
I chose the plain brown bags for my bag skirts because I thought the colours I was using would co-ordinate well with them; I decided to leave them plain, but they could be decorated with rubber stamping, Distress Inks blended with Ink Dusters or foam pads, or even sprayed with paint or glitter spray, with or without stencils or masks. You could also cut out different shapes and glue them on – any embellishment would do, as long as it didn’t compete too much with your bag skirt.
I felt that the plain white bags were too stark, and would definitely need some treatment to tone them down a bit.
On somebody’s blog (if you are reading this, I apologise that I can’t remember who you are!!) she had wrapped the handles of a bag with 2 contrasting shades of ribbon which looked very effective. Any colour that co-ordinated with your bag skirt would do.
I’m very grateful to Penny Duncan for her lovely designs and free cut files – OK, I’ve redrawn them for my purposes, but the original design is hers. I’m grateful too to Tim Holtz for the inspiration to draw and cut the winter foliage, pine cones and swirls, and for his instructions for making the pine cones. I have not uploaded these cut files to my SkyDrive as they are too close to Penny and Tim’s originals and I would not claim them as my own.
I hope everyone is now fully enlightened as to what bag skirts are, and that you have enjoyed walking through this project with me!
The bags all packed up with Christmas presents and ready to go.

Bag Skirts Part 1

So – I’m finally putting you all out of your misery and revealing the answer to the question that so many of you have been asking, “What on earth’s a bag skirt??” It’s an idea I got from Penny Duncan – you can see her mouthwateringly gorgeous bag skirts on her skydrive here.

A bag skirt is basically a rectangle of card folded in half, with a slit in the fold which fits over the handles of a paper carrier bag. It holds the top of the bag closed, and the edges can be cut to whatever shape you like, and of course you can embellish it however you want.

Many of us take several presents with us when we visit family or friends over Christmas, and what better way to present them than in a pretty bag that you have decorated yourself? Gone are the days when I turn up with a grotty cardboard box or a Tesco bag!! If you don’t put the person’s name on it, they can keep it and recycle it next year.

These are the plain brown bags I used:

I got them from Unipack-Worldwide on Ebay, which supplies all sorts of cool packaging stuff, and is post free too! Unfortunately they didn’t come in time for me to use one for the presents for my aunt and cousins which I took up with me to the funeral – I did have one in my stash though, which did well enough, although it wasn’t quite as strong as these. This supplier also does them in plain white, and (I think) one or two other colours like pink, and stripes. You could decorate the bag as well, if you wanted, with some rubber stamping or distress inks. I have decided to leave mine plain, and have chosen colours for my bag skirts which will co-ordinate nicely.

In this “Part 1” post I am dealing with the first ones I did, based on Penny’s “baroque” design – I took her holly border design and amended it to fit what I wanted to do. I think Penny’s designs may be for quite small bags - she has designed the cut file all in one piece. I didn’t have any paper large enough to cut on the cutting machine for this, so I redrew her shapes to make a front and a back piece with an overlap for gluing, and created three different sizes of each one, to fit the different sizes of bag that I’ve got.

The first one is the bag I made for my aunt, and then (since we got back from the funeral) I have made two more – another large one and a medium one. This is my aunt’s one:

You can see that the handles aren’t quite so nice on this bag, and the paper is a lot thinner, too.

Penny’s design comes complete with poinsettias in the cut file, so I’ve used those, although I prefer her other poinsettia design (she’s done two). This bag skirt uses a combination of drawing and cutting on the cutting machine.

On my aunt’s (Version 1) I drew the design of the holly border using the Cricut pens in the pen holder instead of the blade; I filled the design in quite heavily with marker pens afterwards; here’s a detailed photo.

The holly leaves are actually green, and the berries red, although they look black on the photo. I also added some clear embossing powder to the leaves and berries, which I did not do on Version 2 of the bag skirt.

Here’s a detail of the front panel.

On this photo you can see the detail of the background paper I used for the text frame. This was a background I created from some scans of the ancient parish records from our church which you can read about here and here.

The main paper is some 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper I’ve got in my stash. I’ve inked all the edges of the papers with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

This is the back of the bag skirt. In this case I’ve redrawn Penny’s holly motif to form a rectangular border to fit my bag skirt, and repeated the framed text, slightly smaller, and without the poinsettias.

You can see the overlap where I joined the two pieces together. On subsequent bag skirts, I’ve overlapped the back piece on top of the flap of the front piece so that the join doesn’t show as much. On this photo you can see the metallic gel pens I used to colour in the design of the border, catching the light.

These are the poinsettias that I made for these bag skirts:

They are very simple and quick to make, and are stuck together and to the bag skirt with hot glue. The centres are yellow Stickles – Penny has created an element in her cut file for the flower centres but I don’t get on very well with these – possibly because the Cricut doesn’t cut them very well. I think the Stickles work really well!

Here’s Version 2 of this bag skirt, complete with one of the new bags.

As you can see, the handles are a lot nicer than the bag I used for Version 1, and I have also used different papers this time. The holly border is different, too – less heavily coloured in, which I prefer. I did the outline drawing on the Cricut with a gold metallic gel pen and then just added the red and green with marker pens afterwards.

Again, the papers are inked around the edges with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

This is the back of Version 2.

You can see I’ve made a matching tag. I punched a small hole in the back piece through the slit for the handles – I’d originally thought of simply tying the tag onto the handles, but then I thought it would be difficult to remove the bag skirt; this way, the tag and bag skirt come off together, and the tag can be easily removed if the recipient wants to recycle the bag skirt next year.

Here’s a detail of the holly border on Version 2. I think you’ll agree it’s better than Version 1.

Perhaps it would have had more impact with some clear embossing on the leaves and berries as before, but I forgot to do it, and then thought it looked OK without.

Finally, here is a detail of the text on the front of Version 2.

I did the outline with the Cricut, using a black glitter glue pen (this doesn’t show up as metallic or glittery on the photo – just black!) and then filled it in with a red marker pen. If you look closely, you can see a distinct “wiggle” in the drawn line – I think Jiminy Cricut must have Parkinson’s Disease! Apparently the Cougar doesn’t have this problem and will draw nice clean lines. From a distance it’s not too bad, though.

See Part 2 for the other design, and the video.

Sheba has Arrived!

On our way home from my uncle’s funeral, we took a detour to Derby, to collect Sheba, my new Black Cat Cougar cutting machine. We had arranged this beforehand with the wonderful Dawn, who with her business partner Colin, has designed these amazing machines – collecting it in person saved me the carriage and insurance fees even if it did cost us a bit more in petrol. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to meet Dawn in person as she was busy, but we met her husband who had everything arranged ready for us.

I have joined the Black Cat Forum which is full of lovely people who are so friendly and helpful and always encouraging the Cubs (as we newbies are called!) to ask any questions we like. Now that I’ve got the machine I have been able to access the user manual which I am going to print out, as it will make good bed-time reading!

When we got home, my hubby carried Sheba upstairs to my ARTHaven and put her big box on the floor.

Opening up the box, I found her nesting all safe and secure:

where she’s unfortunately got to stay until after Christmas! I’ve got far too much to do to be able to play with her for a while – it’s going to be a steep learning curve discovering all her tricks, and I don’t want to rush it, or fall into the trap of thinking I can complete my Christmas projects using her, because this would only lead to frustration if I don’t know what I’m doing.

I am determined to take it slowly, learning each stage step by step before advancing to the next level, and taking the advice of others on the forum, such as keeping a record of every cut I make initially, so that it will be easy to decide what settings I need for each individual project.

Watch this space over the next few months! Although of course I want to be able to cut paper and card with Sheba, she is capable of so much more. I want to emboss and cut metal, and make 3-D objects such as jewellery and hair ornaments, and some new decorations for my wheelchair! I also want to work with leather – I’ve got a big box of scraps of fine soft leather in lots of colours, which I bought as a cheap job lot at the end of a craft show many years ago from a glove-making stand – I’ve only used a very small amount of this and there’s lots I can do now I can cut different shapes more easily.

You can also draw with any pen, but a special pen holder is needed for this. I was not able to get all the accessories I shall eventually want (such as the engraving tool), and anyway, there’s plenty to learn and get to grips with in the meantime, until finances allow me to get the rest. So far, in addition to the basic kit which consists of the normal mat and standard blade, I’ve got a “click” blade housing (something like the one on the Cricut), a blade for cutting thicker media, and the embossing tools and mat, so lots to play with! Also included is a small pen holder which allows you to use a ball-point refill – I think my gel pens should work fine with this for the moment.

I just hope this sleek black kitty will be content to remain in her box for a while and not get jealous of Jiminy Cricut as I continue to use him to complete my Christmas projects!! (He has been told that his days are numbered.)

This is a new adventure for 2012. I’m really excited!!

When we arrived home, I found a parcel of goodies that I’d ordered had arrived:

I decided after all to get the Tim Holtz seasonal distress inks as I need them for the bag skirts I’m making, and I also ordered a couple of distress stains that I was missing. At the bottom of the box is a stack of distress core’dinations papers which are just gorgeous, and then some Tack’n Peel which is a sort of sticky film that you can put on an acrylic block and then use it either to adhere unmounted rubber stamps or anything else you want to stamp with. Finally, the box on top was a free gift, a Martha Stewart embossing kit. There are a couple of small pots of embossing powder, an embossing ink pad (I now have 3… I wonder if I can manage to keep this one clean???) a very nice acrylic block and a sheet of clear stamps, several of which I think will be quite useful.

I’m hoping to be able to make my next bag skirt tomorrow and will be able to use some of these materials. Today I’ve felt pretty wiped out after all our adventures, but this evening I’ve designed the next bag skirt using some ideas of Penny Duncan’s, and also some Tim-inspired shapes! Hopefully once I get going it won’t take too long.

Then it’s present wrapping time again… Is anyone else as far behind as I am??

WOYWW 132 - Bag Skirts and Present Wrapping

What? - we are all saying – yet another week gone by? Christmas is now just around the corner. Welcome to another “What’s on Your Workdesk Wednesday” blog hop courtesy the lovely Julia who organises us each week as our Chief of Desks, so that we can travel around the globe (virtually) to enjoy everyone’s messes and creativity.

Thank you everyone for all your good wishes recently, over my ill health, and over the death of my uncle. The funeral is on Friday, and weather permitting, and my hubby permitting – he says his throat is bad tonight (he had a bad throat recently – the one he was generous enough to share with me, so hopefully he’s not going down with another one…) we shall be travelling up on Thursday (tomorrow) and returning on Saturday. As a result, I doubt if I shall visit many desks this week – when we get back there will be a lot to do. Since I was out of action for over a fortnight with my throat infection, and now having to be away for 3 days, I am seriously behind with everything.

Anyway, to my desk! Here’s a picture of my brown table which is in utter chaos today, with piles of scrapbooking paper and cardstock ready to hand so I could get at it to make my rather exciting project for this week! On the left you can see my big laptop running Make The Cut. My Cricut is out of shot to the left, all  connected up.

On my main desk is a project I completed yesterday evening – a bag skirt.

I’m going to do a separate post about this so I won’t go into any detail here or it will get too long.

I’ve got a bit of a rush on because we need to take the Christmas presents with us when we go to the funeral, to save posting them. In addition to finishing the bag skirt, I have also wrapped all their presents to go in the bag.

I’ll also be blogging about my gift wrapping in due course so won’t say any more here.

One bit of good news – I discovered that my new Black Cat Cougar cutting machine will be coming from Derby, which isn’t very far from where we will be spending the next few days. I contacted the lovely Dawn and she said of course I could collect it in person! I am thrilled because a) I shall get to meet her and b) I shall save myself the fairly hefty carriage and insurance costs (it’s a heavy and valuable parcel). So as long as we actually get there, I shall be returning home with my new Kitty!

Hope you all have a great week. When we get back I’ll try and visit a few of you but I’m afraid I won’t have the time or energy to do too many!

WOYWW 131

I know we all say it, but WHERE has the last week gone??? It’s absolutely terrifying… I’m at least a fortnight behind with all I have to do because I was out of action so long with that awful throat infection, and now I’m chasing my tail trying to catch up, and we’re at the end of the 1st week of December already… Anyway, first of all thanks to Julia for organising yet another “What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday” – for all who don’t know what this is all about, click on the WOYWW logo in my sidebar and it will take you to Julia’s blog where you can sign up and join the fun, nosing around everyone’s work desks and seeing what we are all up to.

At last I am feeling better enough to do some stuff. I’m making 3 more of my butterfly mirrors – the first one I made for the recent village exhibition and it was one of the pieces I managed to sell. Here’s a picture of it:

Click here to see the the process in detail, and more photos.

I need to make a couple more for Christmas presents, and I thought I’d keep one in reserve and put it in my Etsy store.

Here’s my desk as of Monday, showing the first stage. For this design I use Ikea mirrors that are already painted black, to save me doing it – the edges are already black and I don’t have to prepare them in any way. In this picture you can see one of the mirrors, with the pieces of silver mirror card cut ready to stick onto the mirror frames.

The next photo shows them at the next stage (Tues. p.m.) with the silver mirror card glued on, and the butterflies and swirls stamped with archival black ink.

The final photo (small hours, today) shows them after I’d finished painting the shapes with Daler Rowney Pearlescent Acrylic Inks. As always, the colour doesn’t look as intense on the photo as it does in real life.

Once they are fully dry, I need to spray the surface of each frame with acrylic varnish, and then later today (after I’ve been to bed lol!) I can apply the glass bead gel medium when the varnish is fully dry, and complete the project.

I think I’m right in saying that I invented the technique of using a thin layer of glass bead gel medium over mirror card – I haven’t found anyone else doing it! The effect is wonderfully scintillating!

Behind these 2 mirrors you can see the inks I used, and behind that, all those little white things are small “happy birthday” sentiments that I cut with the Cricut last week, some of which have been applied to the cards I’ve made for my mum. You can also see a portion of Tim Holtz-style clock face left over from my steampunk clocks mirror project and various other bits and pieces on what really isn’t a very tidy desk this week!!

Thank you all for your lovely comments last week, and a special thank you to those of you who commented on my piece about my lovely uncle who died on Sunday morning. Very much appreciated.

Next week we may be away for the funeral – weather permitting – I hear there’s snow in the Midlands and we may not make it. We haven’t been given the date yet. If we do go, I may be absent from WOYWW. If so, have a good one!

Digital Drawing

As usual, I have been asked to design the service sheet for our church carol service. This year they have produced a separate sheet with all the words of the carols and dispensed with the purchased carol sheets which had got very tatty and didn’t contain all the ones they wanted anyway. In the past there always had to be additional words on the back of the service sheet to make up this deficiency, but this year the back sheet of the A5 booklet was blank, so I decided to put a picture on it.
This took me far longer to do than the whole of the rest of the sheet, which is always a doddle because I’ve kept all the previous versions and can use them as templates, and the front cover always remains the same, with just the date being changed.
I found a free digistamp image on the internet, of some Christmas candles:

This was approximately the sort of thing I wanted but I wanted to improve on it somewhat. I was limited because the image had to be greyscale to keep the cost of the printing down.
I opened the file in Serif DrawPlus and traced each element of the image onto a separate layer, and rendered each part with a shaded fill.

It didn’t look finished, and I hadn’t achieved the effect I wanted, so I created yet another layer and chose a pencil effect brush, and drew some sketchy outlines and some shading, which finished it off better.

This is much more the effect that I wanted; I think the dynamic lines bring the picture to life.
Tomorrow I shall convert the whole service sheet to pdf format and forward it to the person who’s arranging the printing. All done in plenty of time before the 18th December!

Some Exciting News! Imminent Arrival of a New Kitty!

---but not one to make Beatrice and Phoebe jealous!!

For some time now I’ve been getting increasingly fed up with my Cricut. First of all, I was really hacked off over the court case between Provocraft (the manufacturer of the Cricut cutting machine) and the designers of the excellent software Make the Cut (and subsequently, I believe, SCAL) which meant you could no longer design your own cut files and cut them with this machine. I was OK because I had the old firmware, but anyone updating the firmware, or buying a new machine, would be stuck with the very expensive Cricut cartridges only, and no possibility of cutting their own designs.

That’s absolutely fine for a lot of people who are more than happy to cut other people’s designs, and more power to them – at least they can cut different shapes and continue to make their cards and other projects, but for many of us, that is far from being enough. I’ve had a taste of designing my own stuff and wouldn’t want to give that up.

Also, as usual with any of my technology, I push it to the limits and make huge demands on it! I have been finding that cutting simple shapes is no longer enough for me. I want to be able to cut small and intricate pieces, and more complex designs and projects, and quite honestly, the Cricut is simply not up to the job. What brought it to a head was when I made the Christmas roses for my altered boxes – I used Penny Duncan’s lovely Christmas rose pattern, and on her superb instructional video, she showed how beautifully her Black Cat Lynx cutter had coped with the delicate centres of the flowers – not a single “spoke” was torn. I was really jealous of this! She’s been singing the praises of her wonderful new machine for a while now. When I attempted to cut these flower centres with the Cricut, less than half the spokes survived. I had to print Penny’s pdf file and cut them out by hand.

My hubby was in my ARTHaven the other day when I was cutting something, and he could see that the result was far from perfect. I’ve been moaning about it for a while in his hearing, but didn’t think he was that interested or even listening to my ramblings!

The lack of accuracy and cleanness of cut leaves much to be desired. For example, in the spring, when I made Wonderwoman’s mother’s 70th birthday card, when I cut the window for the box lid, I cut a second window in the box lid lining so that I could sandwich a sheet of acetate between the two layers, and the cut was “out” by about 1/8 inch when I came to align the layers. I had to trim the aperture in the lining, and cover the inside edge with a narrow gold peel-off strip, which actually finished it off nicely, but that wasn’t the point!!

Another example. I designed an svg file of a “bracket” style frame a while back, and used this to embellish the box I made a couple of days ago for my mum’s Christmas present, cutting it in the silver card.

Superficially I suppose it’s OK, but examine it closely and the inaccuracy of the Cricut cut is revealed.

The two paths of the cut file for the frame have moved out of alignment during the cut, making the frame slightly asymmetrical. Also the cut itself is not quite clean, having a ragged edge, and this despite having a new blade in the machine.

I brought the finished box downstairs and showed my hubby, and pointed these deficiencies out to him. Despite my thinking he hadn’t been that interested, he’d obviously taken on board what I’d been saying over the past few months, because he said, “I think you should just go ahead and get that new machine.” I couldn’t believe my ears! Music to them, in fact. I felt I now had “permission” to go ahead and invest in a new machine that I knew would do what I wanted.

When Penny got her Lynx I was very impressed indeed, but looking at the details, I decided it was worth getting the higher spec machine, the Cougar, which will cut much thicker material than the Lynx. For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to cut shapes from mounting board (mat board) which is far too thick for the Cricut, and quite impossible to cut anything complicated by hand. I thought I would eventually get this machine, but when my hubby said that, and with the frustration I’ve been feeling of late, I decided to bite the bullet and go for it!!

A few days ago I signed up for the UK Black Cat forum and had a browse around, and read what people on there, and elsewhere on the net, have been saying about the machine and its capabilities. Having searched extensively, I have to agree with one person who said they hadn’t been able to find a single negative review of this machine anywhere online. It’s beautifully engineered, heavy, sturdily built to enable it to cut with the pressure needed, functional, metal not plastic, built to last and will do what I require it to do. It is not tied to any particular software or cartridges – in fact it was designed with people like us in mind, who want to do our own thing and do it well, without any hassle.

So… yesterday afternoon I put down a deposit on a Black Cat Cougar cutting machine! The model I want is out of stock at the moment, and apparently the new machines will be arriving later this month, and they are already selling fast, so it was suggested that I reserve one with a deposit.

If I had known then what I know now, I would not have bought the Cricut, but gone straight for the Cougar. However, I didn’t know, and at the time the Cricut seemed a big enough investment. As an entry level machine it was very good, particularly as I was still able to cut my own designs with it, but since then I feel I have moved on and require something more sophisticated. I am hoping to be able to sell the Cricut; it has an embossing kit with it (hardly used) and a couple of cartridges (not used, apart from the fact you have to have a cartridge in the machine in order to make it work at all).

I’ll keep you posted about when my new kitty arrives! I’m very excited about it! Meantime, it’s back to the forum, and Youtube, to learn as much as I can about it before it comes. It’s a sharp learning curve and not for the faint hearted but it will be well worth the effort, to have such a superb tool at my fingertips.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!! GRRRRRR. Big FIERCE kitty! Cut that out!! Lol!