Monicas Creative Room

Harvest

This summer I have been busy as usual with all things to do in the garden. I have harvested a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers from the greenhouse. I have made lots of pickled cucumber! The carrots are so sweet and tasty and the salad is crisp and nice. Last weekend I picked red and white currants from our three currant bushes. There where not that much berries in the white one but the two red ones had lots of berries. I also picked gooseberries. Here is a picture of the harvest.

During the next two days I made juice of all the berries. Lots of bottles!

Building a shed

We have also spent much time building a new storage shed. The old one was too small to store all the garden tools in. We definitely need a bigger one. We started building during our summer holiday and of course the weather made it hard for us. It was too hot! Now when the summer holiday is over, we still have some work to do on it before it’s finished.

 

New designs

After a long break (as usual during the summer), I now feel the creativity is returning. This time I have made some simple card designs with cutouts along the edge.

I will make more of these later.

You can find the new files here.

 

/Monica

My designs are pretty intricate so you need a crisp paper and not to thick, 65 lb is perfect. I love the WorldWin cardstock like the ColorMates. It cuts like butter and are perfect for intricate designs but any similar paper should work. Always use a sticky mat so the cardstock doesn’t move when cutting and be sure your blade is sharp.

The settings I use when cutting with my Silhouette Cameo

Blade set to 2 or 3 depending on how new my blade is.
Thickness 30
Speed 10 (Yes, I always cut on max speed!)

I can’t recommend the cutting settings for other machines because I don’t have any experience with these.

How intricate can I cut?

When I draw a design, I always have in mind that I want it to cut well in most cutting machines. Therefore, I try to make the lines not too thin and inner angles not to pointy. If I only should consider what my Cameo is capable of, I would be able to draw even more detailed and delicate designs. But I know that not all machines are as good as my Cameo.

I recently made a test cut on one of my doilies (Layered Doily 56) to see how small I could cut it. Here you can see the result:

I think it’s amazing that you can cut the design so small and still get a great result.

The result shows that if you have a good cutter, you should be able to cut most of my designs much smaller than the size they are in the files.

/Monica

I have been busy working in the garden during the latest weeks. The snow has melted and the birch leaves has just sprouted and are tender green. The spring has arrived and soon the summer will be here. Today its warm weather but cloudy and some light raining. Daffodils, cowslips and some other early flowers are in full bloom.

Today I have brought all my summer plants out of the greenhouse for the first time. I will be carrying them in and out during some days now to acclimate them to the sun. In about two weeks I should be able to plant them out in baskets, boxes and in my flower beds. Then the risk for frost in the nights will be over.

The first mosquitos have also arrived. How I hate them! It’s almost impossible to be outdoors when it is much mosquitoes. Yesterday, I ordered a Mosquito Magnet Patriot. Hopefully this summer will be mosquito free!

Hugs
Monica

Edit: Hmm. I saw I had posted the wrong picture of one of the cards earlier. I’m sorry about that, the picture of the first card in previous post is corrected now.

Here are the last cards for this time. 🙂
You can find them for downloading at the bottom of the page here.
Enjoy!

Monica

 

 

Before Christmas I was working on a bunch of new four fold cards, but I had so much else to do so I completely forgot about them. I do not understand how that happened but recently I found them again. Now I have finished them for you. 🙂

I will post them in two batches. This is what the first batch look like and you can find them for downloading at the bottom of the page here.