Contribution to Vacation Field Guides

I am so excited!  My Spring Garden Kid's Craft Project is posted over at Vacation Field Guides.  It was so fun working with my girls to bring a little spring into our house, as we wait for the snow to melt.  If you want to check out this simple and fun craft you can do with your kids, go to Epcot's Flower and Garden Project.  The best part about this project, we had all the materials on hand and my girls keep talking about all the things we need to add to our garden.  We have many more crafts in store to make this spring garden full of life!

Cricut's Best of Pixar ~ It's a Bug's Life

When I first purchased the Best of Pixar Cricut cartridge, I was pretty excited about all it had to offer.  I had a little concern about the difficulty of creating some of the characters because Disney cartridges are so detailed, but since I am a huge Disney fan, I just had to have it!  In my post Cricut's Best of Pixar ~ Nemo, I found the Nemo characters I created were not as difficult as the princesses or Cars characters (these links will take you to my reviews of each).  I took this as a positive sign that maybe this cartridge would be a little simpler.  On the scale of difficulty, the Bug's Life characters fit somewhere in between the Cars images and Nemo images.

Whenever I get a new cartridge, I always "test" out the images at 4 inches.  This is simply because if I were making a card, this would be the size I would use.  I decided to create Flik first.  Flik only requires 4 cuts: the base, his exoskeleton, outer eyes, and eyes.  The body pieces were very detailed and narrow, but they were easy to cut and remove from the cutting mat.  But, the eyes were so tiny, I couldn't use them.  (See my photo of the eye by a centimeter ruler).  So, at 4 inches, my little Flik had no eyes.  I then recreated him at 6 inches.  I was more successful at getting the eyes off the mat at a larger size.

One of the things I really looked forward to with the Bug's Life selection on this cartridge was for my Disney's Animal Kingdom pictures, especially the ones of the Tree of Life. Unfortunately, there is a limited selection for Bug's Life.  There are 6 images (3 characters, 3 icons) I can make: Flik, Princess Atta, Dot, the Bug's Life logo, a princess saying, and a leaf.  Not much selection compared to the Nemo characters, though I do understand it is not as popular a movie as Finding Nemo.  Of course, if they were to add all the Bug's Life characters there would be the same issue for the level of details and difficulty, and most likely, they wouldn't all fit on one cartridge.

So, though I do really like the images I can create from the Bug's Life section of the cartridge, I was a little disappointed in the limited selection.  It would have been nice had Hopper been included, but that is because he would be a great addition to my Disney scrapbook pages dedicated to the Disney's Animal Kingdom attraction "It's Tough to be a Bug."

You can find my Flik in my post over at Vacation Field Guides.  He makes an appearance in a Spring Garden craft I created with my girls!  See if you can find him!