Here’s the track layout I built with the new Useful Engine Shed:

Today was National Scrapbook Day, so Zach gave me a day off from mamahood and took Wyatt out and about. The boys hit the library and the zoo, then came home around 3 pm. Wyatt fell asleep in the car on the way back, so we had a couple more hours of peace and quiet while he finished his nap.

It was nice to have a day to myself. Because I work full-time, I try to spend as much time as I can with Wyatt and Zach in the evenings and on weekends. I also need to pitch in and help with cleaning, meal prep and general household maintenance, so by the time Wyatt goes to bed I’m usually too tired to work on any of the projects I have swirling around in my brain.

I started off the morning by taking a challenge from an online message board to try to make a scrapbook page from start to finish in an hour. The theme of page was “every day beauty” which is on the cheesy side, but I decided to give it a go anyway. I got off to a good start — I ran around the house taking pictures for 5 minutes, then uploaded them to the computer and formatted them for printing. But when I printed them out they looked funky. It took me a minute to figure out what the problem was, but then I realized that the black ink wasn’t coming out. I spent the next hour trouble-shooting the problem, so by the time I got the problem worked out my deadline was blown, but I finished the page anyway and it was my favorite thing I made all day. All told, I finished four pages, which isn’t too bad considering how much time I wasted with the printer. I’ll try to take some pictures and put them up in the next couple of days.

Later, when Wyatt woke up the two of us headed out to Michael’s. Last Tuesday was my 5 year anniversary at my job and Nolo gave me a nice bouquet of flowers and bonus check to go with it. Most of the bonus is going to go into the general fund, but I decided it would also be nice to get everyone in the family a little treat too. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and get myself some scrapbooking goodies and Wyatt a new piece for his Thomas set. I picked out some of the new Martha Stewart stuff. Most of her line is pretty humdrum, but I found a few things I liked. Wyatt came home with the Useful Engine Shed or as he calls it, Thomas’s house. I built a sweet track layout with it when we got home and Wyatt got a good hour or so in playing with it before bed.

A few weeks ago I got a new scrapbooking toy — a Cricut. A Cricut is an electronic die-cutting machine — sort of like a self-contained computer with a knife in it. Or maybe a printer, except instead of ink it’s got a knife? Except, a printer needs to be hooked to your computer and the Cricut doesn’t. Got it now?I gave Zach and Wyatt a little demo a few weeks ago and Zach photographed it, so I’ll show you too, Internet.

So here’s the machine all ready to go. In the lower right corner there, you can see the font cartidge is plugged in. The one I’m using here is a basic serif font called Base Camp. You can get all kinds of cartidges with shapes and stuff on them, but I’m mostly planning to use mine to cut out letters. I’m not so into the whole shape thing on my layouts.

Next, I set the letter size, from 1 - 5 1/2 inches and type in the text I want to cut out. I then put a piece of paper onto the sticky cutting mat, insert the mat into the machine and let it do it’s business.

Once the letter has been cut, I remove it from the mat with an Exacto knife. The mat is pretty sticky to keep the paper from slipping while it’s being cut, so this can be tricky sometimes.

I can also set the machine to cut shadow versions of the image.

Now I can stick the two pieces together. Wyatt helps put the adhesive on.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my new toy. I’ve used it on every scrapbook project I’ve worked on since I got it. Stay tuned for some new layouts featuring my Cricut.

All photos by Zach.