Retired Disney Cricut Cartridges

As you probably already know, I am a huge Disney fan.  So when I purchased my Cricut machine, my goal was to get my hands on every Disney cartidge they have.  I have all but one, and in a recent search to find Pooh Font, I realized it is now retired as of this month.  It is still available in many places, but I can only imagine that the announcement of its retirement will significantly increase the price on ebay (my number one source for cartridges at this point). 

Here are the Disney cartridges being retired this month (if it has a link, it will bring you to my previous posts that I used these cartridges for):

• Happily Ever After (A Disney Princess Cartridge)
• Mickey Font
• Pooh Font (the one I am still in seach of)
• Cars
• Tinker Bell and Friends

If you want to see the entire list of retired Cricut cartridges, you can find it over at Cartridge Library.  After searching ebay, and even the official Cricut site, these cartridges were all still currently available, so if you plan to purchase them, you may want to do so soon!

Which Disney Cricut cartridge is your favorite?

Joey's Disney-Pixar Cars Room

Paint Colors - Bone White & Three Cheers for Pooh

We decided to redecorate Joey's room with his favorite Disney characters from the Disney Pixar Cars movie.  It is amazing how well he knows the cars ~ their numbers, name, etc.  He first saw Cars when he was two and now it has become his most favorite of all Disney movies.  We started collecting the die cast cars for him and I believe he may have just about every car in the collection, and I am not kidding.  There are only a few that I know he doesn't have.  At this point, I am not sure who is more obsessed with finding all of them ~ Joey, my mom or me!  Of course, once we think we have them all, Cars 2 will be out in theaters and we will be starting the collecting all over again!  He had such an interest in these cars that I actually used them to teach him colors and numbers.  People thought I was crazy to buy him all 8 or 9 Ramones, but there is one in every color of the rainbow!  Same with the Piston Cup racers ~ I used these to teach him his numbers. 

Wall Clings from Lowe's

Because of his love of all the cars in this movie, it was only natural to create a Cars room for him.  Since I have been without a paycheck for the last four years, I had to be a little creative in what we were going to do because we are on a strict budget.  My dad had already installed chair rail in this room, since it was actually a Disney princess nursery and we were changing over from pink and white to red and tan.  A few years ago, I found on the clearance rack at Lowe's the wall clings of all the Radiator Springs characters and signs from the movie.  We found a Cars comforter on clearance at K-Mart's online store.

Comforter from K-Mart.com

For the paint, we only use Benjamin Moore paint.  But Home Depot, who carries the Disney specific colors, does not carry Benjamin Moore.  So, I took some of the Mickey Ear paint samples (these are also good for scrapbooking by the way) and brought them to my local hardware store.  Now the red we chose was called "Three Cheers for Pooh."  They scanned the sample and were able to match the color perfectly.  We already knew for the "tan" color that we would be using Bone White, a Benjamin Moore color we have used in other rooms. 

Snotrod, Wingo, DJ and Boost made with my Cricut

The room came out great, but it was missing a few things.  First we need to find fabric for a valance.  Luckily, my mom is a sewer, so she is going to make it for us.  The problem is I saw the perfect fabric at WalMart and didn't buy it because I wasn't sure how much I needed and when I went back to buy it, they didn't have anymore, story of my life.  So, now I am searching for something new, though I don't seem to be able to find anything I like.  The other thing the room needed was a few more characters.  I couldn't find many of the characters that Joey liked and the ones I could find were just too expensive, so I decided I would make them.  So I took out my Cricut Disney/Pixar Cars cartridge (by the way, I found this in the clearance section for $19 at WalMart) and went to work.  Joey requested Boost, Wingo, DJ and Snotrod.  They came out pretty nice and I think people wouldn't even know they were homemade, unless you looked really closely!  Joey has now put in a request for Mac, Chick Hicks and The King.  We'll see how those come out!

Here are the characters I created hanging up over the window - no valance yet though!

Edited: I posted in October 2010, an update - Joey's Cars Room is FINALLY Complete! which includes photos of the valance my mom made.

Disney/Pixar Cars Cricut Cartridge Review

My brother and sister-in-law just sent my son a few little school things for Joey's first day of kindergarten.  So I had Joey help me design and make a thank you card using my Cricut machine.  I found the Cricut Cars Cartridge a few months ago in the clearance section at WalMart, which was very exciting.  My son is absolutely a Cars fanatic ~ he has a Cars bedroom, probably has collected every single die cast car from the movie, and has had a Cars themed birthday for his last 4 birthdays.  Needless to say, this Cars cartridge has come in very handy.

One of the best things about this particular cartridge is that it includes just about all the characters, other than specific piston cup racers, from the movie and for most characters there are at least two different versions you can create.  In addition to the characters, there are a lot of accessories including street signs, road pieces, and different popular sayings and symbols from the movie.  For example, if we look at the character "The King," you can create 3 different versions of him, his name, the Piston Cup and the Dinoco sign.  Each character comes with several accessories, which I love!  Now the only negative I find with this cartridge is that the characters are extremely detailed, which means cutting out a lot of very small pieces and finding where they fit in.  This means in order for me to be able to create them, without making myself crazy, I have to make them large, since my smaller Cricut machine does not cut as precisely as a Cricut Expression would (I am hoping to upgrade to one soon!).  So with that in mind, the card I created is very large to accommodate the large vehicle my son chose to decorate his thank you card.

In order to create this card, I also used the "Mickey Font" Cricut cartridge.  I created a license plate with the word "Thanks" on it.  Surprisingly, the Cars cartridge did not come with the license plate option. It seems it would fit in perfectly.