Cricut Circle Cartridge Challenge Project

Hi friends and fellow crafters! These past few weeks have been so busy a round here. I hope everyone is doing fine where you are. My prayers and thoughts are with all in the Midwest affected by those horrible tornadoes and flooding.

We have been doing a monthly challenge on the Cricut boards using the Circle Cartridges. I originally was using Animal Antics, I really like that cartridge very much. The challenge is supposed to run for 12 months but many of the participants needed a change from their carts, so we switched things around a bit. I ended up taking Letter Envy for my cartridge. I will be posting a project a month for the next three months. This is going to be more challenging than I originally thought. Some of the layers on the fonts are very thin, this is fine with larger cuts, but my title letters were cut around an inch and a half. A couple of the letters are pieced and re-pieced together, LOL!

I created a layout about the past 3 weeks. Spike, my youngest fur baby accidentally got out of house on May 14th. For almost 2 weeks, we were looking for him. So our days went something like this: Get up, get Danny off to his program, get my Mom up, get her situated, wait for the hospice aid, go out looking for Spike, come back, make lunch, hang with my Mom until Danny comes home, wait for Pete, when Pete gets home, go looking for Spike, have dinner, go looking for Spike, get Mom ready for bed, pass out and repeat the next day. It was exhausting. I made flyers, I searched in the rain, I spread cat litter in the forest by our house and left little trails of it leading back home to us. I learned a few things over those 2 weeks. I discovered we have forest by our house! I learned that I can print over 100 pictures using my ink refills. I found out that I should have my eyes checked because I chased a raccoon one dark rainy night for almost a half hour thinking it was Spike. The most important lesson I learned is that there are many caring people out there. My neighbors helped me search for Spike, good people called saying they thought they spotted him, people shared his picture on Facebook. All this for one little cat. It's a beautiful thing. Last Sunday, my Mom got up early, around 6:00AM insisting she needed to use the commode. She has basically been bed ridden since mid March after breaking her hip in February and then having a heart attack the night before she was due to be discharged from rehab in March. It was an odd request, but I got her up and put her on the commode. She ended up doing nothing. Sooo, I lifted her back into bed and swung her glass door open, (thank you hot flashes!)  and heard a tiny meow. There was Spike on the back deck! I was so shocked, I didn't believe what I was seeing at first. After I smothered him with love, I snapped the picture on the layout using my cell phone. He was much thinner, but in overall good health. Sadly, the same couldn't be said for my sweet Patches.

Patches was my oldest fur baby. She was almost 17 years old. She was a little street cat from Bayonne, that would play with me when I would park my car. It was barely a year after my Dad's death and I was still mourning, plus for other reasons too long to get into here, from that September through Christmas, it was a very rough time in our lives. She would make me smile whenever I saw her. On Christmas Day, I went to the neighbor's house that she would always be around and asked if I could adopt her. They were happy for her to get off the streets and I was happy for her companionship. She was my comfort giver cat.  She had been doing more sleeping than anything over the past few months, and I suspected her life was winding down. Last week, I noticed she had what looked like an infected tooth. I took her to the vet and they started her on antibiotics. She kept getting worse with each day and on Wednesday, I knew for sure that she was dying. She was barely walking and eating and only drinking some water. I called the vet and we decided to let her stay here and die at home if that was possible. Thursday night, I was sleeping on the couch, and she somehow crawled from the ottoman she was laying on to lay next to me. She always slept by me so it was one last gift of comfort from Patches to me. On Friday, I knew I had to return the favor. I needed to bring her to the vet, I felt like she needed help to leave me. It was a very peaceful end to a special cat's life. I stayed with her and she didn't fight the vet's help.  The picture I used for the layout was a favorite of mine. I took it when we were out in the backyard in the summer of 2009. I used to have it as my avatar for message boards.

Now that you know the story behind this layout, here are the crafty details. I used Letter Envy for the title, Meow for the paw prints, Rock Princess for the hearts and the broken hearts, and Pet Shop for the cats. I colored the cats using copic markers. Everything is from my stash. The papers are a mixture of October Afternoon and Pink Paislee. I also used some Washi Tape and two chipboard boarders from Deja Views on the top and bottom of the page. The journaling was done on my computer. I used the Cricut Craft Room to create this layout.

At first, I wanted to add more to the layout, but the very busy lettering, made me decide to kept it simple.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today!

 

Happy Crafting!

Colleen