It's a Cricut Card, REALLY!

So of course you all know I've been enjoying a bit of a diversion with stamping and the like but look again here. This is a Cricut card. At CHA I spent alot of time with fellow Custom Crops Design Team sister Amy Chomas of Chomas Creations. Amy makes those fabulous mini gel pen, mini sharpie, and micro mini sharpie holders that work in the Cricut like the Cricut markers but SO MUCH BETTER! (Over a martini or two, hee hee) we got to talking about Copics and she said "Well you know you can use my pens with Copics too." What? Are you kidding me? Sure enough. (Okay, so I'm a little surprised I remember the conversation...)

Although I LOVE the images on the Tinker Bell and Friends cartridge, the chances of me cutting those teeny little pieces are slim to none. Instead, using Design Studio, I placed both the shadow and regular cuts of Fawn and that gorgeous floral corner on my screen for placement. Then I copy and pasted the shadow images to another screen and welded them and went back to the original screen and deleted them. Now I have one mat for drawing and one mat for cutting. I replaced my blade with the mini gel pen holder and first drew the images. (I used pressure 3, speed 3 but in DS the speed has a mind of it's own) NOW, DO NOT UNLOAD THE MAT, PRESS LOAD MAT (not load last) and replace the pen holder with your blade again. (ADJUST YOUR PRESSURE to cut, VERY IMPORTANT) Go to your second page (with the shadows for cutting) click cut and voila! Now you don't have to use DS for this if you're just cutting single images and it works the same way. If this is clear as mud, check out Amy's video HERE.

WOW! Now I could color to my heart's content and didn't have to fussy cut around the image to pop it! I have the freedom to resize like a digi, WOOHOO!!! I don't know about you, but those Disney carts drive me up the wall and I can see getting SO much more use out of them with my pen holder! Not all that much more needed for the card either. The gorgeous paper is K&Co Que Sera Sera, a bit of that sort of weird sparkly fuzzy $1 bin ribbon from M's and "imagine" in wire attached with my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher. Guess you still can't really see it, but it's there and looks pretty cool in person.

Not a whole lot of dimension here, but this was a first attempt. It will be interesting to try drawing and cutting the layers for even more dimension. Thanks Amy for cluing me in to this fabulous application for your mini holders. I'm SURE to be using them a whole lot more now, not to mention all of those nearly unused Cricut carts I thought I just HAD to have. Be sure to check out Chomas Creations for more great ways to use these FABULOUS holders (including the embossing kit which I'm anxious to try after seeing Amy's super cool layouts). They can be purchased right on her blog (as well as Custom Crops) and I have to mention that they are manufactured in the USA which is always a big deal to me (especially in this economy) by Amy and her family members. (Tell me that's not cool and deserves support!) Luv ya, girl!

I'm also linking this up to Scraptastic Saturday which is a great new feature on Hannah's blog where you can view a wide variety of fun creations all in one place.