How to Download CCR Files for Your Cricut

Have a Cricut?  Sign-up for Cricut Craftroom?  Or maybe not.  Just can't quite make heads or tails out of everything?  Maybe not as cut and dry as you thought it was when you made your impulse purchase?  We hear that from a lot of people who fell in love with the watching a video on what a Cricut Machine could do and ordered one, then just couldn't quite connect the dots on how to bring it all together.  Janae shows you how a very cute file from Cricut, The Official Blog for Gone Fishin by Shantie Fowler.

Our Take on My Sister's Scrapper Vintage Paper Bag Mini Album

We did "My Sister's Scrappers" tutorial on the

DCWV Timeless Type Vintage Paper Bag Mini Album

What a great job Ginger did on making the extensive video series for the My Sister's Scrappers Timeless Type Vintage Paper Bag Mini Album. If I counted right, there is seven YouTube videos in all for this album series. But the great thing is that she shows you once how to do it, then speeds the video up through her repetitive actions. She's great in her explanation of each step and her videos show all the details. There is no needs for confusion here.

 Another great thing about this album, is that you can easily substitute ideas for each page to something that is applicable to you. I actually crafted this album while visiting my oldest daughter in Denver, so we each did one. She's a very clean, non-cluttered crafter, and chose a more simplistic layout. She wanted more "real estate" for attaching pictures of her 4 year old, than journaling. On the inside of her back cover, she attached the mini-album pocket by Kathy Orta, Paper Phenomenon, for more photo options.

The binding that is used in this Vintage Paper Bag Album is one from Laura Denisons stack the deck binding.  This is a great binding to use with the paper bags because the gausset on the side of the bags adheres nicely to this binding.  Plus it allows you plenty of space to have pockets upon pockets on your pages as well as many embellishments.  Sometimes when you make an album, by the time you are finished decorating out the pages, the album won't close and you have an awkward closure created to hold the album closed.

The other adjustment we made, was that we used the smaller craft bags from Michaels. This was nice because we cut down on the amount of paper used, but on the downside of it, we had to do all our own measuring. But because Ginger did such a great job in the tutorial, it was not difficult to stop the video and adjust our measurements to fit our paper bags.

So our project was a compililation of My Sister's Scrapper, Kathy Orta and Laura Denison.  But this is the great thing about all of these artists, is that they make their projects available and adaptable for everyone.  Below is our supply list:

• Craftboard
• 4 sheets of 12 x 12 Black cardstock
• decorative 12 x 12 papers of your choice, we went through about 2 x 6 different designs
• scissors, paper cutter, craft knife
• embellishments and found objects, like paper clips, bottle caps, paper clamps, safety pins
• adhesive - scor tape, Scotch quick dry adhesive
• Strings, ribbons, old jewelry (we like to cut up clearance necklaces for the beads, charms and chains)
• Printed tags such as KC & Company, Recollections, Heidi Swapp, Smash, Me and My Big Idea