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Scrapbook With the Cricut Expression

Posted on June 17th, 2009 by admin in Scrapbook Software Tips
Candace Johanson posted:


Scrapbooking is the latest crafty phenomenon.  With the advent of digital cameras, traditional photo albums have gone by the wayside and what better way to keep important photos and the memories attached. There are so many tools for avid scrapbookers from different papers, scissors, stickers and shapes, would it not be great to have all these products in one central location and at the touch of a button? Cricut Expression is the answer.  This personal electronic cutter allows you to create some of the most beautiful and personalized shapes to add flare to even your most basic of paper crafts.

Resembling a photo printer, the Cricut helps you design and cut out beautiful and unique designs to use in your scrapbooking projects. With the ability to create shapes between 1/8th and 24 inches, it’s perfect for a scrapbooker that wants more control over their designs. As for the paper, the Cricut will work with any paper including cardstock, vellum, and even chipboard.

The Cricut is lightweight and is easily transportable for any scrapbooking party. If you need to travel with it, there is also a carrying case available, specially designed for travel and comes complete with padding, wheels and a handle. All you need is electricity and a passion for scrapbooking and the Cricut will work for you.

Now here’s the best part – If you don’t know how to use a computer, the Cricut will work on it’s own without the use of a computer. The Cricut takes cartridges that contain all the information that the machine needs in order to cut various shapes. Want more of different shapes? Just purchase another cartridge and you can have literally thousands of shapes and fonts at your disposal.

If you do know how to use a computer, connecting it to a computer will make it even more flexible than the machine on its own. You can purchase software called “Sure Cuts A Lot” that allows you to design your own patterns, shapes and fonts and have the Cricut do the rest of the work by cutting it out for you. With the software, there’s no limit to what you can design. If you have the ideas, the Sure Cuts A Lot software will help you design it.

For those concerned that a machine might waste paper by not utilizing all the space available, don’t worry. The Cricut has been designed not only to create wonderful shapes and fonts, but it will do it in such as way that will maximize the user of the paper, which will help keep the amount of waste to a minimum.

The Cricut Expression will cut vinyl up to 24” long. You can create wonderful wall words and sayings. Using the Cricut Expression you can create beautiful etched glass. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

All this sounds great doesn’t it? Now you’re wondering just how much a handy little machine like this will cost and I have good news for you. Low down payments and an easy payment plan as Seen on TV Cricut commercial which was a late night infomercial called “Scrapbooking the Easy Way”. Get your very own Cricut to impress your friends with it and your new designs at your next scrap booking party.



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The Web is Full of Free Scrapbook Supplies

Posted on June 9th, 2009 by admin in Scrapbook Software Tips, Scrapbooking Tutorials

Because there are so many Web-savvy scrapbooking image designers today, you can find plenty of free digital scrapbooking designs online. That means all you need to know is how to do a Web search and download files and you can have an almost endless supply of designs to create professional-looking scrapbooks. That’s why famous artist Mary Englebreit recently remarked that the Web is so overflowing with terrific free digital scrapbooking materials, it can provide almost any type of images you might need. And she should know about good images; products carrying her graphics sell like crazy!

The following are samples of some of the types of free scrapbooking graphics I’ve found on the Internet:

Vintage

There seems to be an upsurge in the number of people looking for antique scrapbooking images. Maybe that’s because antique art is so timeless and doesn’t date the final product to any particular modern era. Antique cards make wonderful vintage scrapbook embellishments, as does antique clipart. And if you’re lucky enough to find vintage designs on digital scrapbook papers, you’ll experience digital meeting traditional in a beautiful and useful way. Vintage graphics also cover a wide variety of subjects, including images as diverse as vintage airline posters, vintage flower embellishments, tall sailing ships,  magician posters and Victorian fashion illustrations. So whatever subject you’re trying to cover in your scrapbook, there’s probably vintage art to match.

Holidays

Holidays are great subjects for scrapbooks, since those are the occasions when many of us create some of our most lasting memories. And it’s not just the “showier” holidays, such as Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day and Halloween that inspire scrapbooks; it’s the minor holidays too. There are all kinds of patriotic scrapbooking papers and embellishments on the Web for holidays such as Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Fourth of July and Flag Day. There are also images suitable for Earth Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and just about any other holiday you can think of; even the silly or off-beat ones.

Butterflies and Flowers

I’ve definitely noticed that scrapbookers love flowers, and why not? They’re appropriate for almost any occasion. Butterflies, too, have a large audience, because they bring to mind so many things we love: freedom, summertime and other happy things. Butterfly and flower images are also diverse, because an abundance of them can be found as both illustrations and photos, and in modern and vintage styles. There are even  butterfly scrapbook embellishments that have coordinating modern and vintage designs available in the same collections.

Weddings

Scrapbooks and weddings are a natural combination, because wedding photo albums have always been traditional anyway. But a wedding scrapbook can preserve your memories in an even more creative way. There are many good free wedding scrapbooking images on the Web that will allow you to create one of these very special mementos with no or little cost. And if you can’t find any specifically for weddings, flower images would also be a great choice.

Babies

Like weddings, tiny tots invite photography. And what scrapbooker wouldn’t want to pass down a distinctive baby scrapbook to her child as he or she gets older? Fortunately, you can find a huge selection of scrapbooking designs for babies. If you haven’t looked at baby images for a while, though, you might be surprised to learn that the colors are less traditional than they used to be. Chocolate brown, burnt orange and red are popular, as are various shades of green. Blue and pink are still popular, of course, it’s just that you can find a lot of bolder color choices too.

So the next time you go looking for scrapbooking materials, check out what’s available on the Internet. You might be pleasantly surprised at the free images you’ll find.

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Use Free Clip Art and Scrapbooking Supplies to Help You Design a Fun and cost-effective Baby Shower

Posted on June 5th, 2009 by admin in Scrapbook Software Tips, Scrapbooking Tutorials

Even though the economy isn’t great right now, people are just as interested as ever in being able to throw great baby showers for their friends. The trick to doing this in a slow economy is to save money in areas that won’t be noticed. There’s no reason that can’t begin with the baby shower invitations and move right on through the shower decorations and the scrapbooks created after the fact.

One of the means to do that is to find good baby shower graphics. Often you can find very nice free images online. Just search for “free baby shower clip art,” plus the type of image you want. For instance, if you’d like pink baby girl clip art, enter those words or some variation of them in the search box. The same will work with virtually any theme you can think of, although the more obscure the concept, the less likely it will be that you’ll get enough good search results. If you’re lucky enough to find high resolution art when you search, you’ll open up more options for using it. That’s because that you need high-resolution images for print pieces, such as invitations or decorations. You certainly wouldn’t want to use low-resolution clipart because the end result won’t be clear. That would never do for a baby shower invitation, thank you card or decorations.

But clipart isn’t the only baby art resource you can find free online. You can also find many sites online that offer baby scrapbook paper. A number of good designers give away no-charge versions of their baby shower scrapbook page layouts to promote scrapbooking designs they sell or to get people to come to pages that have advertising. Either of these models give them a financial incentive to offer scrapbooking paper and embellishment freebies. Either way, the new mom wins! There are almost as many baby scrapbook themes as there are stars in the universe, so that means you’ll probably be able to make shower invitations and decorations from them if you can’t find suitable clip art. Themes range from fun to vintage and retro to luxurious. In case you didn’t know, retro is particularly popular right now, so you might want to try searching for free vintage baby scrapbook embellishments. A mom-to-be who is into that kind of art would probably be thrilled to have that as her baby shower theme!

Remember, these free baby shower clip art images, scrapbook papers and embellishments can obviously also be used to document the baby shower in a baby shower scrapbook that would make an excellent gift for the mother-to-be. That means any image searching you do will pay off in more ways than one, giving the new mom a baby shower she’ll remember forever.

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