Sentimentals & Heritage

I finally sat down today and played with two new Cricut Cartridges, Sentimentals and Heritage.   I think these will get a lot of mileage from me and my Gypsy girl.   I absolutely adore the images on these two carts and think they will be very versatile.  Click HERE if you want to see the Sentimentals Handbook and HERE if you want to view the Heritage Handbook.   These links will take you to the .pdf files for these handbooks.  FYI, you can always view the Cricut Cartridge handbook at the Cricut Library.   HERE is a link for that.   This is always helpful when considering a new cartridge if you do not have Cricut Design Studio or a Gypsy. 

The card above is one of the shaped cards from Sentimentals.  The envelope is the coordinating envelope for this shaped card.  The ink bottle, pen, and “Miss You” text are also from Sentimentals.  The cute little parchment scroll is from the Heritage cartridge. 

The paper used was Sundress Laundry Line from My Minds Eye.  Lots of glitter!  I cut the main card from Bazzill and then I placed another card shaped on my Gypsy mat and dragged side off the mat so that only the front was on my mat and would, therefore, cut.  If you try to adjust the width, it alters the decorative shape, so that wouldn’t work.  I also used a little Bling cardstock.  Now, I will share with you that I spent quite a bit of time today playing with different settings on my Cricut to cut the Bling carstock into these small intricate cuts for the ink bottle silver layer and shadow, pen base and nub, and the “Miss You” sentiment.   After much trial and error and a whole piece of paper now sitting in my garbage, I found that I was able to get a good cut with the regular blade set at 6, pressure at 3 and multicut 3.   Since the speed is set by the Gypsy, I keep it turned down to the lowest speed.   I might have achieved different results if I would have been able to alter the speed.  I still continually have trouble with Bazzill cardstock.   Someone needs to create a really great cardstock with some texture and dimension that will cut really nice with our Cricuts.

The card itself, ink bottle, and pen finger guard are cut with Bazzill cardstock.  The parchment was cut with Rustic Cream cardstock from Papertrey Ink and adhered with dimensional square.  The edged were inked with TH Distress inks. I also added a little shading to the ink bottle with my Copic markers.  I added even more Distress ink towards the bottom of the card to somewhat ground the ink bottle and parchment scroll.