State Fair

Each child in Tiffany's fifth grade class-- in fact all the fifth graders in her school were assigned a state to study and report on. After this nearly one month project, they held a "State Fair" where each child acted as a tour guide of their state. They dressed as a famous person from the state and even handed out samples of local cuisine. Tiffany chose to study Illinois-- as that is where her dad served a church mission. It was difficult for her to decide between dressing as Abraham Lincoln or Jackie Joyner-Kersee, an Olympic athlete. As you can probably guess from the picture, she decided on the athlete. I made her two gold medals to wear, and cut the letters USA to tape to her jacket. Her food sample was even harder to choose. We considered and threw out the idea of getting a Chicago Deep Dish Pizza. She finally decided to give out Oreo cookies, as Illinois has the largest cookie factory in the world-- Nabisco.

Fire Lite CC LLC

That's the name of my new business! I just set it all up today. I made up a website, too. Come check it out at www.firelite.cc. That's where I'll sell my svg files, cards (plus a card mailing service!), and whatever else I come up with. Eventually, Corwin will include flashlights and other trinkets he will make on his lathe... once the Jetta is done.

Me and my Cricut

Last fall I visited my cousin, and she showed me all the cool things she makes with her Cricut machine. Now, I'm not one to spend all my time decorating or scrapbooking. Still I was intrigued. I mean, how cool is it that you can make paper dolls, cards, scrapbook pages, decorate walls, make glass etching templates, etc, etc all with one little machine? So, yah, I was impressed. Machines were on sale for black Friday, and I decided to buy one. Now, there was a drawback that I could see, and it was buying cartridges. All the cool little design elements have to be bought separately via cartridges. Corwin encouraged me to search the internet for alternatives. This I did, and happily came upon a design studio for the Cricut called Sure Cuts A Lot. (Cricut also has its own design studio for purchase, but it is not compatible with making your own designs, and you still have to buy their cartridges). So for the price of a cartridge or two, I can make and cut practically whatever I want!

There's so much I've done with the Cricut already! The kids made simple valentines that were personal and unique for each of their classmates. I cut the words out to decorate our Primary bulletin board at church. We've made many cards besides.

I made our Christmas cards last year. I started out by designing a snowman family. It was quite fun. I paper pieced a few together. There were so many little pieces! It literally took me an hour to glue all the pieces on one card! After a few of them, I got smarter and decided to simplify my cards, so the rest were simply wreaths. :) I thought they were cute, and oh! so much less time consuming.

Lastly, I'm going to start offering my designs and cards, etc. for sale. I've just made a new blog site for this purpose. If you would like to follow it, it is located at http://firelite.cc.