Would You Ever Guess Wednesday

It is Would You Ever Guess Wednesday over at Erica's Craft Room. On Wednesdays we feature projects using the Feature keys on the cartridges. I will admit these are keys I often forget about when using my carts. It is too much of a hassle to pull out the book and flip through the pages. Yes, I admit to being lazy. Anyway Cricut Craft Room has changed that for me. I didn't think is would make a difference for me since I have a Gypsy, but being able to see the mat and the images to choose from make it so much easier to use. It is also nice to look at it on my big laptop screen. Anyway... I am getting sidetracked. The carts I used the feature keys on were Twinkle Toes and Lyrical Letters, but I hope when people look at this project they aren't thinking Independence Day either.

Here is the completed project, but be sure to read on to see what I did and get a few easy tips to make using your Cricut even more enjoyable.

The wreath came for The Dollar Tree. My Dollar Tree normally has these wicker wreaths and for a buck they make a great base. I knew I wanted some flowers and a little banner, so I started flipping through papers. I came across these gorgeous papers I purchased from Erica's Craft Room Store. They are Kaisercraft papers from the Bonjour Collection.

The papers are double sided and these are the backs. Both sides are just gorgeous.

I already have a saved file in CCR that I use to make my crumpled flowers that I want to lie relatively flat. I used a flowers off the Mother's Day Bouquet cartridge, but you could use any scalloped circle from any of the carts. A friend asked why I would do this in CCR and not just use the cart alone. Well I positioned the scallops so that 2 each of four different sizes would fit in a 6x6 area of the mat. This allows me to use the papers out of the 6x6 stacks. Since I am not much of a card maker, I don't really use my 6x6 stacks and I have been given several and this has me using them. I then cut the paper for the flowers and went ahead and made them. Now it was time to start making the banner. I do not own the banner cart or any of the carts that have the cute little banners, but I was sure I could find a way to make one. I opened CCR and started searching through the images. I found a banner in Independence Day, but it didn't have a top layer. I just resized it in CCR. It was very simple to do. Erica is going to have a CCR tutorial on Ustream very soon, but in the meantime if you can't figure out CCR go through the tutorials in the program. There is a tutorial tab in the upper right corner once you are logged into CCR. I wanted a little scallop across the top of my banner pieces and thought I had seen something in Twinkle Toes that would work. I used the layer of the stage curtain and used the hide and contour option to hide the actual drape panels. I then lined it up to resize it on the mat. I ended up with three layers on my mat, but in CCR you can see all of them at the same time. Here is what my screen looked like.

I then just glued the pieces together using Scotch Quick dry Adhesive. I love how it works on projects like this. I needed letter and needed them small. I used to hate cutting small letters because they would rip or not cut well. I finally found a font that is my go to font for itty bitty letters. Lyrical Letters has a feature called Jumbo and it is perfect for really small letters. These were cut at 1/2 an inch and they cut beautifully.
Now is was time to attach to the wreath. I pulled out some bakers twine and hot glued the pennants to it. I simply made a line of glue on the top part of the pennant and then pressed onto the twine laying on my nonstick mat, so I didn't burn my fingers. Then I hot glued the twine and the flowers to the wreath. I used a sheer ribbon to hang it. Here are a couple of close ups.

I hope you enjoyed my project. Feel free to follow me as I will have a new DT project every week. I love comments, so don't be shy. Have a super Wednesday!

To see more projects like mine head over to Erica's Craft Room and check out all of today's projects.