Christmas Projects

Now that Christmas is over & presents have been opened, I can finally post some pictures of things I was working on! First of all, I was so excited to learn a few months back that the Cricut machines can cut vinyl; opening tons of opportunities. My little ‘bug’ was busy this season and has definitely proven worthy of cost!

There were some other projects as well, but these were just a few of my favorites.

Family Home Evening Board

This one took a while, but it was so fun to see it come together so nicely. I got the board and sanded it. Jeff routed the edges with his new router saw & bit set (actually an early Christmas present for both of us). Then I painted it, and carefully planned out the letters/sizes etc. I found a little sign shop that was run by a nice lady who even let me try some of her vinyl for free. After cutting out all the letters (with my handy-dandy Cricut of course!) in paper, I positioned them accordingly and then one-by-one replaced them with the vinyl letters, using masking tape in place of transfer tape. From that point Jeff drilled the holes for me; then I bought pegs, painted them and placed them in the board. The final step was getting each name/star finished; painting, doing the letters, punching the holes, (with another useful scrapbooking tool nonetheless- the Cropadile. See honey, all these scrapbooking items really are useful!) and threading the ribbon. The letters were a little trickier to do since some of them had to be smaller, but I found a way to cut them smaller and I think they turned out nice. Anyway, I was pretty excited about this project. Although it was busy and sat on my kitchen table many a night, it was well-worth the time. Plus, Jeff helped out with this one so he was pretty proud of his handy work as well!

Name Boards

Another project involving wood boards, paint and vinyl letters. Once again I found the wood at Home Depot; sanded it and had it cut to size. From that point, it was picking out the paint color and painting the boards. It’s amazing how many coats of paint you have to put on sometimes! Then it was time for some help from the Cricut, cutting out the letters in paper and positioning them on the boards. Next I cut out vinyl letters and placed them one-by-one on the boards with my improvised transfer tape.

Paper Doll Book

Back in August, they came out with the new and exclusive Paper Doll Dress Up cartridge for the Cricut machines. In addition to providing a nice amount of extra income by selling a bunch of them on ebay (they were exclusive to AC Moore a craft store found only back east and some sold on ebay for $200 each) this cartridge is packed with tons of fun things! I had wanted to do a paper doll project for a while, so when I found out we had my almost 3-year old niece for Christmas I was excited. Jacob and Caleb had a blast helping me pick out what “outfits” we would cut out for the doll. We did thirteen outfits: pink princess with crown, superhero, genie, ballerina, red dress with hat, wedding dress with veil, cowgirl with hat, basic everyday outfit, Hawaiian girl, purple princess with crown, pixie, pioneer with bonnet, and another pretty maroon & orange dress. After cutting out and putting together all the outfits, I cut out the doll; then each piece was laminated. From there I put magnets on each piece. I think the biggest challenge was finding a way to adhere the magnet to the laminated surface; nothing seemed to stick really well. Finally I found something that worked – glue dots. Then I found the folders and put the rest of it together. This project was a lot of fun & even allowed some participation from Jacob and Caleb. They, of course, weren’t interested in the girl clothes with the exception of picking out which ones they thought Kadie would like the most; but they had fun choosing other things for me to cut out for them- dragons, swords, boys, horses, dinosaurs, etc. We did those in between some of the dress ups. Anyway, we all had a lot of fun with this one!

Scrapbook Pages

I think this project was also lots of fun. We had Gideon for Christmas, my new little nephew that is two weeks younger than Matthew and baby number seven for the Stevens family. He got some baby toys as well, but I thought it would be fun to do a couple scrapbook pages. The layouts came together pretty quickly and I finished them in just a little over a day. It’s not too hard when you have good pictures of such cute kids!