Cricut Explore Air for Mother's Day

Cricut Explore Air™ for Mother's Day

**This post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking through my links. 

Looking for the perfect gift for a crafty mom for Mother's Day? Well look no further than Cricut! Their incredible Explore Air™ machine takes cutting, writing, and scoring to a whole new level. It'll be the Mother's Day gift that keeps on giving!

For starters, it has built-in Bluetooth technology, which makes it wireless. That means that mom can take her projects wherever she goes and save her projects to the cloud. It's also compatible with Cricut's Design Space iPad app, so mom can lay all of her cuts in the Design Space and see everything she's cutting all at once on her iPad. Adios paper-based handbooks! 

Here are a few other neat notables of the Explore Air™ machine:

• It can cut over 60 different materials, including leather, balsa wood, fabric, vinyl, tissue paper, craft foam, and even silk! Mom just sets the dial to the material that she needs to cut and the machine keeps track of the settings.
• For cutting layers, mom can just print them on her printer and have the Explore Air™ cut it out.
• Fonts and images can be uploaded for free so projects can have writing on them that looks just like handwriting.

The Cricut Explore Air™ machine has an unbelievable amount of helpful, time-saving features. And if that weren't impressive enough, Cricut is taking $50 off their Explore Air™, officially making this one of the best gifts to give crafty Mom's this Mother's Day!

Colouring Book SVG 201 with Crafts By Two

Today I cut the svg cutting file that I made following the How Two: Coloring Book SVG 201 Tutorial by Crafts By Two.  I used the same image as the 101 Tutorial.   

In the 101 tutorial you cut every layer. I had a lot of small pieces with the eyes, brows, nostrils & mouth all cutting separately and needing to be layered.  The 201 tutorial goes over additional steps to eliminate some of those extra cuts.   I was able to have the smaller pieces cut out of the face and have the black layer underneath show through.

There are the pieces all cut out. Notice the layer with the face.

Here I have it mostly glued together. So much easier than trying to place every piece on the face in proportion to each other.  

This shows the face from the second over top of the first - I wanted to see how close I was in guessing where all the pieces went in the 101 piece.  Not too bad I was off just a little bit. 

Here are both cuts side by side, the 101 piece is on the left and the 201 piece is on the right.  I didn't have a coloured image in front of me when I used Inkscape for the 201 so I didn't notice that I had changed the hair to the side of the face in the second cut.  The finished product isn't much different but was way easier to cut and assemble by eliminating all those extra pieces.  I will definitely be using this tutorial again to make more cutting files for my personal scrapbook pages. 

Find the Tutorials on the Craft By Two Site.

See my original post here

If using a licensed image to make a cutting file remember personal use only.

This image will be used in my Walt Disney World scrapbook. 

Colouring Book SVG 101 with Crafts By Two

About a month ago I bookmarked the Crafts By Two Colouring Book Series and printed off the reference sheets that go along with the videos.   Yesterday I decided I would follow along with the first tutorial - I didn't watch any of the videos, just used the written instructions.

I've used Inkscape in the past for converting images to svg for using with My Memories Digital Scrapbook Software.   And that was only to import as solid image after using trace bitmap.

I found the written tutorial very easy to follow.  I had watched a video that someone else had done and it didn't work.  The Crafts By Two didn't leave out any steps and I was able to save my svg and cut it out with my Cricut Explore last night.

I found this image online.  I was looking for an image with larger pieces and everything connected for filling in with colour.  I do have a few Disney cartridges that I bought in the United States so I had a good idea of what I wanted when piecing together of all the cuts.  

I imported the picture into Inkscape and followed the instructions by 

Crafts By Two - How To: Coloring Book SVG 101

Here is my svg uploaded into Cricut Design Space.

Each piece cut out with my Cricut Explore.  Even the teeny, tiny pieces for the nostrils cut out. 

Here's my finished image all glued together.  

The only piece that didn't work well for me was the highlight on the nose.  

I ended up removing it and using a black pen instead.  

I like how it turned out even with having to put the face together like that.  

I watched all the videos this morning and using the same image I am going to follow 

Crafts By Two: How To Coloring Book Svg 201.  

I will post that as soon as I have it cut and pieced together and will show a side by side comparison with this first image. 

To see the video tutorials and download the pdf instructions visit:

Crafts By Two - How To: Coloring Book SVGs - The Complete Series

If using a licensed image to make a cutting file remember personal use only.

This image will be used in my Walt Disney World scrapbook. 

CTMH Paper Bird Hostess Rewards Stamp Set

Here's a card I made using the new CTMH Paper Bird Hostess Rewards Stamp Set.

I was inspired by a card made by Margi Gilbertson. I loved the colour combo that she used with this stamp set so I had to do one myself.  I changed it a bit, using the CTMH Glacier patterned cardstock from the Whimsy Fundamentals paper pack. I tied a little knot in the Glacier twine instead of a bow.

I would have loved to have done similar to hers but both of my hands are sore right now so I had to be happy with just a little bit of stamping and no bow tying.

I used my CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge to cut the circle, scallop circle and branch.

This stamp set is available as Hostess Rewards when your CTMH Gathering reaches $150 or more.  If you are in Canada and would like to be Hostess contact me at nshelmer@icloud.com for more information.   Online Gathering option is available via my CTMH website.