Bliss & Miscellaneous

Christmas came early at our house! Look what arrived over the holiday weekend…

The new Silhouette Cameo! To which my husband responded, “Now WHAT is it?” I just told him it was his Christmas gift to me and that I loved it.

I don’t do a ton of scrapbooking (mostly because it involved too much planning of going to the store and buying the page decorations etc) so I’m excited to be able to just make what I want as I need it. Plus I like to make paper decor for parties and holidays so this will save me a few hours with the scissors.

Initially I’d considered getting the KNK Zing (since it cuts thicker materials) but as the first batch of preorders arrived it seemed that even those familiar with cutters were having difficulty getting consistant cuts. The Cameo cuts beautiful intricate cuts right out of the box. I’m pretty savvy when it comes to these type of things but I didn’t want frustration to limit it’s usefulness (and having a 6 month old limits the amount of time I can dedicate to getting something to work as it should).

My first cuts looked like this…

This is straight from the Silhouette Store. The Cameo comes with $10 worth of downloads and this weekend designs were half price so I was able to get 20 for the price of 10! I mostly chose things like boxes and templates that I could alter since I have about 5,000 fonts.

Also the Designer Studio software will allow you to cut and edit svg files so I can do all my designing in Adobe Illustrator (and use the huge collection of vector art I own).

More detail shots…

Decided to put Black Friday to good use, so instead of waking up at 3 AM to get ridiculous deals on things we don’t need, I created and ordered our Christmas cards (yea! so happy to check that off the list).

Husband made sure Baby E didn’t crack his adorable baby noggin on our fireplace while I shot as many photos as possible in hopes that we’d get one good one. This isn’t the photo we chose but one of the good ones. I think this outfit makes him look a little like a sock monkey.

Minted.com inspired the design we ended up with. They have some beautiful cards PLUS you can upload your own photo to preview how it looks in different layouts. Which is awesome for us visual learners!

After seeing these super cute soft blocks by Dwell studios, I knew we had to have some. They were adorable, but not $32 adorable.

So I set out to make my own. I bought some fat quarters for $0.79 each and some fusible interfacing. Being picky about having an order to things I made a rubric that listed what would go on each side of each block (it also saved me from having to think about where each piece went later).

I only made 5 blocks so I came up with a set of 10 letters that could spell several words (I only did letters on two sides – you could do the whole alphabet if you used all the sides).

I also did numbers.

And shapes…

I think they turned out really well. The most time consuming part was cutting out all the applique pieces. If you wanted to make it easier you could just do different colored and textured fabric.

I love this orange on blue.

Now to send them off to be drooled on!