Me on Monday

Let me tell you about my Saturday!

First of all, we had unexpected out-of-towners who arrived on Wednesday. I thought they were staying until Sunday, so imagine my joy when I found out they were leaving Saturday morning on Friday!!! I couldn’t wait to get up in my scrapbook room. You know this hobby of ours that is supposed to be so relaxing and therapeutic? Well, today, it was anything but! 

I have Nancy’s round-robin and was excited to get it started. I was in my room by 9 a.m. and started pulling materials together. I got an idea pretty quickly and started cutting paper. I decided on how I was going to do the journaling and got Nancy’s permission to “tweak” it. Formatting it onto the card I wanted to use was pretty tricky. I was so happy with how the front side turned out. Then, when I was formatting the back side, I inadvertently printed the wrong text box and screwed it up! OMGosh! Of course, I didn’t have another journaling card like that. So, I covered it up with a bit of washi tape and paper and ran it through again. That turned out okay.

By this time, it’s 11 a.m. I decided to come downstairs, have lunch, and watch a movie. I had two things to do while I was down there: 

1. Design the title in Cricut design space on my computer, and 2. Do some hand stitching on a couple embellishments for the page. 

I played around with the title, wading through at least 50 of my 700+ fonts--I may have mentioned my font obsession before. They are all perfectly organized too! I couldn’t quite find the look I imagined. So, I decided to do an internet search since it’s a common enough saying. I found one that I loved. Turns out it was a “cut” file on Etsy. I’ve never tried anything like that, but certainly felt capable. I paid 3 bucks for it—I have never paid for a digital file before, but felt like Nancy was worth it since it’s absolutely perfect!! 

I got the download and realized I have no idea how to use it. Sooo, I went back to the internet and watched a 30-minute video to teach myself how to do it. Pretty simple. 

With that all set to cut, I read and took a brief nap. (BTW I watched The Boston Strangler while doing all of this—really good—Keira Knightly—I love her). Okay, I got sidetracked for a minute. At 4 p.m., I went back upstairs to finish the layout. Here’s how that went:

1. I took a page out of Pam’s book and did a test cut on scrap paper. This particular title has 3 levels. I only wanted to use two of them.

2. Started the first cut on the scrap cardstock. It didn’t cut all the way through. Then I realized I had it set for paper. 

3. Ran the next one on the good cardstock which the Cricut chewed up. That cardstock was thinner than the test.

4. Changed the setting to light cardstock and ran it on the next sheet of cardstock. That one worked.

5. Next cut was for the mat. It cut fine, but was the same size as the first cut.

6. The next try didn’t work as the thinking ball just kept spinning. I shut everything down and started over.

7. I’ve lost track of what happened next, but this is what I have--noe of which is usable:

I wasted a lot of good cardstock,but the title is done and looks really good. I ran out of time and wasn’t able to finish it on Saturday. I finished it on Sunday. But here's the kicker. The title was great---but, I realized when I was putting the layout together, I cut it on the wrong side. It was textured cardstock. So the pretty side is on the back!! Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Still it came our pretty good!

All I’ve got to say is that it was not a relaxing day. It was frustrating. 5 hours was a lot of time to not have finished. Oh well. It goes this way more often than not!