Mini Monsters --Cooking with Cricut Cartridge Showcase

Here is a copy of the article published at http://www.cookingwithcricut.com/2011/10/cartridge-showcase-mini-monsters.html that I wrote:

Hello everyone!!  Today I would like to showcase the Cricut Cartridge Mini Monsters.  I have really enjoyed this cartridge and have already made several projects with it.  Some of them include a halloween card that I have made.  This one is really simple with just the shape and shadow cut.  I decided to make my own face with some stamps I had.

And this is a sweet little card that I made for Sean, I forgot to take a photo to show where the monster opens up!  Isn't he just fun? 

Don't have a gypsy and can't do the welding to make shaped cards?  You are in luck with this cartridge, many of the monsters have already creates folding shaped cards!

Another idea is a window card, see how Frankie looks like he is peeking out a window?  This effect is very simple to do.  You can take any open shape, and raise it with pop dots, which gives a window-feel to the design.  

So, what else can you do with this cartridge?  How about making a few little candy wrappers?  For these I cut out the card feature, but made them very small.  The little pumpkin is cut at 1.5 inches and the little candy piece is cut at 2 inches.  I just added a little twine and a few embellishments with some sparkle markers. 

Another fun thing you can do is make one of the 3D items on this cartridge.  I chose to make a little batty bag.  I cut this out at 6 inches, the widest it would fit on a 12x12 sheet of paper.  The secret to making 3D items is to do all of your embellishing, (or at least most) before you assemble it.  For this one I used mostly Bazzill papers, and used my Tiny Bubbles Cuttlebug embossing folder for the mouth, wings, and ear layer 1 parts.  I then used some Clear Rock Candy Stickles and colored in a few of the bubbles in the mouth.  I had this orange patterned scrap (don't you love using up those scraps!) and cut the layer 2 parts out of it.   I outlined the eyes and mouth with a black sparkly marker by atyou Spica.  I had just gotten this cute little stamp yesterday from the JoAnn's dollar bin and thought it really went well with this bag.  I colored the eyes in with a white gel pen on the stamp, and used other atyou Spica sparkle pens I had to color in a couple of the words.  On this project I assembled things with this new glue pen I found called the Zig 2 way glue pen.  I found it at JoAnn's.  It is neat in the fact that while the very thin liquid is fresh from the pen and blue, it is ready to permanently stick.  But, if you let the glue dry and the blue disappear, before you adhere the pieces together, they they are supposed to be repositionable.  I didnt try the later part, maybe on the next project :)

So, after I got most of what I thought I would like for the embellishments, then I assembled the little bag.

An that is just a little of what you can do with the Mini Monsters Cricut Cartridge!
-Kemma