New Year, New My Creative Life Blog 2014

Happy New Year! I'm part of My Creative Classroom's New Year Blog hop at their  brand new My Creative Life 2014 Blog.  It's a companion blog to a free class at My Creative Classroom hosted by Jeri Parks at MCC.  I've been an instructor at MCC for a couple of years now and love being part of such a creative community.  I'm also so excited to be part of My Creative Life 2014.  I hope you will be inspired by all the wonderful projects that are sure to be featured and shared.
My number one craft love is scrapbooking, but pretty much anything involving paper is a win for me!  I love incorporating photos into my projects and have a special passion for incorporating my faith into my scrapbooks and creative projects.  You can take a look at all my classes offered at MCC here.  Right now I'm working on a new class for later this spring which focuses on journaling ideas especially for scrapbookers.
As we are focusing on die cuts this week, I wanted to share a project I recently completed using my Cricut.  This year I made calendars for my daughter's grandparents.  While I did not actually finish them in time for Christmas, everyone received their calendar in time for the New Year!
For my project, I made 3 calendars and I wanted all of them to be pretty much the same so I could finish them "assembly line" style.  This made the process much quicker.  I used a word processing program to create the calendar grid, adding days of the week, major holidays, and numbering all the days for each month.  I printed 3 sets of each month onto plain white cardstock and trimmed the pages to create an 8.5 x 8.5 inch page.  I had also gone through photos and selected about 15 from throughout the year that I thought would be appropriate for each month (with a few extra in case I changed my mind).  I printed 3 of each and got to work.
For this project I used mainly two Cricut cartridges - Designer's Calendar and CTMH-Artbooking.  With all the cartridges and images available, I find it more "freeing" to choose just a few cartridges to focus on for a specific project.  This limits my choices, but it also makes me examine cartridges more in depth and I often find images I didn't know I had.  For a calendar project, DC is a must with the months and days of the week welded and ready to cut in two different font styles and with the shadow feature.  As you can see if the photos below, I kept the pages simple.  Each has the month die cut in coordinating colors and just one or two embellishments along with the photo.  Some of these elements are die cut, some are from various paper collections.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing my project.  I love using my Cricut for gifts and home decor as well as scrapbooking and cardmaking.  It's such a versatile and fun machine.  If you have any questions about my project, let me know! Leave a comment here, or "like" my crafty page on Facebook, KarenScraps, or catch me at My Creative Classroom.