Reason #87 for hosting a scrapbooking party: Sharing your fancy tools with those less fortunate.
I don’t own a Cricut machine. In fact, if it were not for the generosity of my neighbor, I probably wouldn’t even know what the machine did besides chirp.
Okay, it doesn’t really chirp, but with a name like Cricut (pronounced “cricket”) and the amount of money you have to shell out to own one, you’d think it would chirp, dance and piece together layouts while you sipped a tropical libation on the couch.
I cannot afford a Cricut machine. Rather, I just lust after my neighbor’s or attend crops at homes where I know the owners are willing to let me use theirs. If you’ve ever worked with the popular electronic scrapbooking tool, then you know the pure joy it can provide by allowing you to create your own shapes and letters from cardstock, patterned, paper, vellum, chipboard, and other materials, such as leftover photographs. Landscape pictures or other images that have a lot of clutter in the background can be fed into the machine in order to create letters for your layouts.
The machine’s versatility is phenomenal. The number of unique embellishments you can make with the Cricut is virtually unlimited. My latest thrill is crafting personalized foam stamps on the Cricut. All you need to do is select the design of your choice, grab a sheet of foam to run through the machine, mount the finished cut-out on a thick piece of cardboard or small wooden block, and shazam!, you have your own homemade stamp.
Around the holidays my neighbor allowed me to use her Cricut to create my own letter stencils. The machine cuts out the letters, and then you can use the negative space as a stencil for page titles or journaling blocks. By coloring the letters with chalk, acid-free markers or pencils you can really make your layouts pop.