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!

Cricut's Best of Pixar Cartridge ~ Nemo

I am so excited that I finally have purchased the Best of Pixar cartridge!  I had a little time to test it out yesterday.  This cartridge includes images from five Disney-Pixar movies - Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and Wall-E.  Since there are so many images on here, I decided I will review each movie over the next week or so. 

Finding Nemo is a personal favorite of mine.  This was the main reason I purchased this cartridge.  Not only are the characters great for all types of projects, but they will work perfectly for all my scrapbook pages for The Seas with Nemo and Friends Pavilion at Epcot in Walt Disney World.  The characters include Nemo, Marlin, Dory, Nemo's school friends, Crush, Squirt, Bruce and Nemo's friends from the fish tank in the dentist's office.  In addition to the characters, there is an icon for each.  These include anything from the logo for the movie title, to jellyfish, to Bruce's shark buddies.  I love the icons because not only will they be great embellishments for Nemo themed projects, but also any ocean themed projects I might create.

We made a Dory (Emily's favorite) and a Nemo.  Normally, I find the Disney cartridges to sometimes be a little tricky to cut and put together, but that is simply because of the tremendous detail to each character.  If you read my review of the princess cartridge, you know that I find those to be most difficult to use.  But making the Nemo characters was actually quite simple.  For the Nemo I created for this card, I only needed four colors and four cuts. Dory required six colors, but was still easy to assemble.  So far I really like this cartridge!

Cricut Deals on eBay

With my most recent "deal" found on eBay, I decided this would make a great entry for my blog.  I had never been on eBay in my life.  One of my friends mentioned she had gotten some great deals on Cricut cartridges through eBay.  Around here, the only craft store within 30 minutes is a Joann Fabrics.  It is so small though, they do not carry Cricut cartridges.  You have to order them.  This isn't great for someone who is looking to pick up a cartridge that day, but it does make me really consider the ones I am going to purchase - no impulse buys!  Other than that, the next store that sells Cricut cartridges is over 45 minutes away, and I rarely make it down there since my daughter has severe car sickness.

Surprise Your Valentine-Make Your Own Take Out

As you know from my previous post, My Top 5 Rachael Ray Cookbooks, I love that Rachael Ray's cookbooks feature "make your own take out" recipes.  We love to cook and it is a great family activity, since the kids like to join in on the fun too.  Around here, and I am not exaggerating, there is no good place to get take out.  So we either have to drive quite a distance or make our own.  Luckily, we have found a few recipes to make our own Chinese food feast.  Not only is this a money saver, but also a great way to make sure the food is healthy and fresh.

Here are a few of our favorite recipes.  With just the five of us, we usually make two of the items, but last week, we made all these and easily fed 6 adults and 5 children. Even better, all the recipes use a lot of similar ingredients, which means you can cut once for two or three different dishes and save time getting dinner ready.

Dressing Up is Now Easy to Do

Both my girls love to dress up in their princess dresses, jewelry, hats and shoes.  Unfortunately, we had collected so many things over the years, that our dress up bucket was overflowing.  The girls could never find what they were looking for, or if they did find something, half the contents of the tote fell out onto the floor as they were trying to pull it out to wear it.  Finally after about 3 days of having our computer room floor covered with fairy wings, dresses and countless plastic necklaces, I had enough.  The girls and I made out way to WalMart yesterday and made some purchases to better organize our dress up area.