Artbooking in August #3

Cricut Craft Room and Artbooking

Can you believe it is already the 3rd installment of the Artbooking in August Blog Hop?!  Where is the summer going?  As a teacher, I’m seeing these days fly by and realizing that I have so much more to do before school starts.  I need to budget my time wisely these last couple of weeks, so that’s where the Cricut Craft Room comes in handy!  I knew that I wanted to complete a display tray for my home decor project as part of the Artbooking in August Blog Hop challenge.  I pinned a bunch of ideas to my Printer’s Tray board on Pinterest, yet none of the ideas were exactly what I wanted.  I knew I wanted to use the Surf’s Up paper line and Artbooking (of course!), so, I opened up the Cricut Craft Room and created a tab for each color in the kit.  I then placed 3×4 blocks on the page to represent my display tray.  Once I started pulling in the Artbooking images, the design fell into place in no time!  

For those of you joining me from Katy’s blog, welcome!  You are in for a big treat today, because not only am I going to write about this project, I’m going to share a video tutorial and free CCR file!  I can’t wait to see your projects and hope you will post them on the Studio Scrapping Facebook page. 

The video below walks you through the steps I used to create this project in the Cricut Craft Room, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here.  What I will say is that it is so easy to work with images from different cartridges if they are linked in Cricut Craft Room.  Once it comes time to cut, you don’t even need the cartridge in the machine when they are linked.  This is such a great time saver!

As you can see from this screen shot of my Cricut Craft Room file, it looks very similar, I only changed a few of the color blocks when I was putting the final project together.  I’m so happy with the way it turned out!  In fact, when I showed it to my husband, he said, “Oh, that’s nice!”  That was seriously high praise from him!

So, now for some detail shots.  I cut the banner, tree, and tree top out of a used cereal box using my deep cut blade.  I then cut the same images from cardstock.  This allowed me to add more dimension to my project and made the tree sturdy enough to flow off the edge of the display tray.

I cut the tree out of chocolate cardstock but felt it needed something, so I pulled out the stamp set from the Huntington WOTG.  I stamped the woodgrain on the trunk in 2nd generation chocolate.  It is super subtle, but it gives enough texture to make it look like a tree.

The only other stamping I did on this project was on the sun.  I cut it from the Surf’s Up Gold and then used a stamp from Patterned Pennants (it’s the same one I used on my card last week…I’m a fan!).  I used honey ink so it isn’t as orange as the patterned paper that comes in the kit.  I finished the sun off with a yo-yo from the Surf’s Up Assortment.

I used foam tape on the grass and flags to make them pop.  One of the things that I want to do on my next display tray is to add more depth to the various rectangles.  I think it would add some really cool visual interest.  Everything else was adhered with Liquid Glass.

I finished off the project by adding clear sparkles.  Just that little bit of bling makes me so happy!

If you don’t want to watch the video below, you can hop on over to Rebecca’s blog for more crafty goodness.  Remember, if you ever get lost along the way, visit this page for a list of all the blogs on the hop.

Cricut Craft Room Tutorial & Freebie!

I’m so excited to share my video tutorial and CCR freebie with you.