Cricut's Fit to Length Feature & Toy Story Green Alien Glasses

I have finally upgraded to the Cricut Expression!  I am very excited to be able to cut the larger images, as well as squeeze more colors of paper onto one 12x12 cutting mat than I could on the 6x12.  As excited as I was about it, I had no idea how to use any of the features.  At first this meant I just didn't use them.  As a mom of three I have to say honestly, anytime I make my way to my craft area, I usually have my three trusty helpers close behind.  I swear my kids could be outside playing and as soon as I sit down to work on a project, presto - there they are!  Oh well, it has been nice having their "input" on colors and sizes for my projects.

I decided this week to make a point to try something new on the Expression.  For my son's upcoming birthday, we are having a Mater's Tall Tales party (if you don't know Mater, he is the tow truck from Disney-Pixar's Cars).  Now I have planned out the cake, decorations, etc and suddenly, out of the blue, Joey says he wants a Toy Story cake.  Now if you have been following me for a while, you may have noticed I am a classic Type A personality. I plan things out for weeks and having a change in schedule can really throw me off.  So in a round about way I was able to convince Joey that we would make Toy Story cupcakes for school and keep the Mater theme for home.  Since he was pretty excited about that, I let out a sigh of relief and started planning the Toy Story themed cupcakes. 

Luckily I had just purchased the Cricut Toy Story cartridge.  As I looked over my options of things I could make for little toppers for the cupcakes, I noticed that there was the choice to create glasses.  There were three versions ~ Woody, Buzz and the Green Alien.  As I prepared my craft area to create 18 sets of glasses for his class, I realized I had no idea what size to make them.  Then it hit me, now was the chance to test out the Fit to Length feature.  I brought my son over and measured his face from left to right, which was 5.5".  I then set the size dial to 5.5" and hit the fit to length key.  The machine let me know that to create glasses with a 5.5" width, they would be cut at 3.5" height.  Wow!  That was easy.  I didn't have to print several sizes to find just the right one.  So I reset my height dial to 3.5, turned off the fit to length feature and cut the rest of the pieces out.

Here are the green alien glasses that Joey will bring to school with his Toy Story cupcakes (modelled by Hayley's toy dog named . . . Hayley).  He even told me this afternoon that he is so excited to have a Cars cake AND Toy Story cupcakes.  After seeing the Toy Story Green Alien glasses, he then asked if he could look at my Cricut Cars cartridge.  About a minute later, I asked him what he was looking for and his response was, "The kids in my class would love Mater glasses too.  Are there any Mater glasses on this cartridge?"