Party Prep

Hey, world!  As I mentioned yesterday, each year for the Bug's birthday I throw a luau at my house.  It started with her first birthday and then because I had so many decorations left over, it just continued each year.  I usually have an ugliest Hawaiian shirt contest for the adults and the kids all get wet and have a blast.

My Mini

The bad part of doing the same theme each year is trying to come up with something new.  This year, the "new" is the addition of my Cricut.  Now, I'm not a scapebooker nor do I do any of your typical paper crafts like card making, etc.  I am, however, a very impulse shopper and I had some points left on one of my hotel loyalty cards and they had a Cricut Mini listed as an item so guess what...I bought it!

What I didn't realize was that the Cricut is very limiting and you have to buy all the cartridges in order to cut paper.  There is no free-draw option and the cartridges are very expensive.  You can get them on Amazon and eBay but you have to be very careful that if they are used, that they are not linked to an account already.  If they are then you won't be able to link to them but you can still use them with the cartridge in the machine.

Also, I had no idea that the mats would not hold up and would lose their stickiness really fast.  After doing some research, I learned that you can re-sticky your mat using a Zig 2-Way glue stick.  To tell the truth, the mats work even better and last a lot longer with this glue then fresh out of the pack.


Gift Bags for the Part-y!


Anyhow, I decided to do some favor bags for the party using the Paper Doll Dress Up cartridge.  Since I expect more girls to come to the party then boys, I made a heck of a lot of girls.  The Bug helped to assemble them and put them on the gift bags.  How do you like them?

Please ignore the messy background but my dinning room table is also my craft table and my homework station and my just drop it anywhere station!


My Paper Lantern

Each week, the fine folks at Cricut give you a free cut or project that you can do without having to pay a ton of money to buy a cartridge.  You can cut as much as you like that week.  Because it is 4th of July week, they had some cute paper lanterns that you could make but they didn't give any assembly instructions so it took a lot more work they they should have.  I decided to do a couple for the party and used the same colors as the bags to make it fit the theme.  Last hurricane season, I bought a ton of the battery operated candles for next to nothing at the Dollar Store.  These will look great on the buffet table I think.

So what is my verdict on my Cricut purchase?  Not sure if it was a good choice if I had done my research but since the machine was basically free because I used my points and I was able to buy quite a few cartridges for less then $10, overall I think it was an okay purchase.  I would give it a B- or a C+.

By the way, this was not a paid opinion nor did anyone force me at gunpoint to write this post.  I just thought I would give my two-cents on it and let you know some pros and cons.

Love ya,

Kristen