Patience, Practice and plenty of Paper.

Hello Everyone,

Today is Would You Ever Guess for My Cricut Craft Room.  Notice the main graphic is ALL pink?  The entire design team is showing our support for breast caner awareness. I would like to remind everyone to preform regular shelf breast exams and if you're over 40 to have your annual mammogram.   It only take a little time and can save your life. 

Today’s post is more a lesson in the 3 P’s than posting some wonderful eye marveling piece of crafty artwork.  To start, I want everyone to close their eyes and envision a three tiered cake with a beautiful flower bouquet around the top.  Now turn it into a paper creation.  Can you just see it?

Yeah, me too.  So, I have 1 cupcake tower, with party favor boxes set all the way around the bottom two layers for guest to take as they walk by.  I have the top layer protected with a piece of card stock and a flower foam block glued down that I can stick the paper flowers into as if  I was using real flowers. 

 

 

 

I have the Flower Shoppe Cricut Cartridge and seen pictures on the web, so this should just be a piece of cake, RIGHT? 

NO, this is not just that easy.  P-1, be patient with your self.  When you start remember that creation takes time.  One flower has three cut pieces alone.  It took a lot of time to just cut out all the pieces.  Then it takes time to assemble all of them.

 

P-2, Practice, Practice, Practice.  Nothing like this perfect project I envisioned can be done perfectly without practicing first to learn how.  After figuring out that a quilling tool works the best when building the flower centers, I also learned that when I take the tool out of the center, place a few dots of liquid glue down the center so it’s on the edges of the paper.  Then when I smash the center down and let the center unravel just a bit, it’s already tacky and will stick nicely into place.

 

I was also trying to rush things by building all of the candy favors while letting my machines do all the cutting.  (Yes, I had more than one machine going.)  If you put the cartridge into the machine and let it register, you can then pull out the cartridge and continue cutting. 

 

 

P-3, ALWAYS have extra sheets of that special paper on hand just in case the blade drags, the mats to sticky or heaven forbid you should knock over a drink.  Also, have “trial and error” paper.  Most of you call this the “scraps”.  I really should have cut all the outsides in scrap paper, put them together and placed them around the foam block.  Then went back and adjusted my sizes and then cut them out with the real paper.

Here is what I ended out with.  I cut the flowers WAY to big and they wouldn’t even fit around the base of the cake without smashing.  After figuring out that the flowers where to big, I went back to the table to start over to realize A. I’m out of the specialty paper I was using.  B. It’s Sunday, the local shop is closed and the chain stores don’t carry what I’m using and C.  I’m way in over my head and completely out of time. 

 I knew it wasn't going to work so I started just goofing off with it. I glued the flower to the tops of some extra favor boxes.

And then stacked the boxes around the top thinking just maybe I could come up with something that was worth sharing with family and friends. No dice, I must come up with something else by Saturday or the Bride-to-Be will be disowning me.   

 

So, lesson for today is: if you want to create a master piece like you see out there in blog and pintrest land, be patient with yourself, start with smaller projects and practice the techniques that are needed to tackle the big projects and make sure you have plenty of paper to work through your not so perfect attempts.  (yes, this is coming from a paper junkie.  Buy more paper).

For much better ideas on what to do with the flowers on the Flower Shoppe Cartridge, visit Erica's Blog, My Cricut Craft Room and see what the rest of the design team has created.