Make A Wish

For about 9 years, I have been volunteering as a wish granter for the Make A Wish Foundation.  This has been such a rewarding experience.  Today, I was able to marry the craft skills I have been building with my volunteer work and I am so happy with the results!  I experienced such pure, simple joy personalizing this beach bag and sun hat.  I can't wait to see this little girl's face when we deliver her wish at the end of the month!

This was such a simple project.  I used my Cricut to weld three circles together to make the ears and then cut paper templates for the ears and the initials.  I then traced that onto my Pellon WonderUnder and fused that to my fabrics.  I used Peltex for the base to give the personalization plenty of structure;  then layered my fabrics and used a heat transfer glitter T-shirt vinyl from Expressions Vinyl to create the initial.  I cut a length of polka dot fabric for the band of the hat, gathering at quarter intervals and stitching the gathers.  Then I hand stitched the initial patch to the front.  I used a machine zigzag stitch to attach the initial patch to the beach bag.

Cricut Crafting

This afternoon I got crafty with the birthday present I received last fall…I finally got a Cricut die cutting machine!  I had been wanting one for ages and just couldn't justify spending the money when my main bread and butter craft is sewing (althought I can use it for cutting appliqués), so my husband removed that burden and bought it for me.  So, when I was asked to donate an item for a fundraising raffle I decided to dress it up;  I created a thank you card with my information for the winner.  I am thrilled with how it turned out…I plan to make some of these to include as thank you notes with my orders.
While I have enjoyed my forray into the papercrafting world via the Cricut, it does pose some limitations for me;  I am exploring the Cameo Silhouette to see if it can allow me a little more flexibility and creativity…it's very difficult spending all that dough on a Cricut cartridge when I typically only want one graphic (that I probably could have created myself using Illustrator).  I'm specfically trying to find out if I can actually use any font I have and create any graphic to be imported.  If that is the case, there may soon be a Cricut available for purchase.  I would love to read any comments regarding reader experiences with both machines!