Cricut Cartridges And Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking is an artistic expression that started small and blossomed quickly into the global phenomenon that today includes sophisticated cutting machines and the now-famous Cricut, Cricut Machines, and their Cricut cartridges. Gone are the days of cutting out words and patterns by hand. Scrapbookers can now create elaborate designs and phrases for their scrapbooks with the touch of a few buttons. This allows individuals the ability to express themselves more fully, putting scrapbooks together that are able to do justice to the memories they hold.

What is Cricut?

For those that are new to the world of scrapbooking, a brief explanation is necessary to familiarize you with the machine that has revolutionized the way people express themselves through paper-crafts. The Cricut Personal Electric Cutter works together with various Cricut cartridges to create and cut out designs, letters, quotes or personal thoughts for use in your scrapbooks or other crafts.

The cutter does not require a computer to function; it is a completely stand-alone machine. When an individual inputs a cartridge into the cutter machine, hundreds of different design and font options appear. After selecting a design or phrase for the cutter to produce, its programmed blade will carefully cut the pattern out in a very short period.

The Cricut machine can work with a number of different paper products of various thickness, ranging anywhere from vellum to cardstock.

There are currently 3 Cricuts on the market: The Cricut Expression,the Cricut Create, and the Original Cricut Machine. They are all compatible with every of the 80+ cartridges available.

How the Cartridges Works

Each Cricut cartridge has a large amount of data stored on it, as would a computer chip or flash drive used with a standard computer. The data stored inside each cartridge includes many different font types and designs, which range from simple to complex and from minuscule to over-size. Basically, each cartridge provides yourCricut machine with a large inventory of cutting patterns from which to choose. You can select any one of these patterns and your cartridge will automatically program the blades in your cutter to produce the pattern in record time.

The Choices are Limitless

Since each Cricut cartridge contains cutting patterns that are new and unique from the others, the design possibilities are literally limitless. New cartridges are continually released onto the market, expanding the range of design possibilities. There are currently 5 different categories of cartridges. They are font cartridges, shapes cartridges, licensed cartridges, solutions cartridges, and last but certainly not least Classmates cartridges.

Font cartridges do what they say they do and create nice fonts for you to scrapbook with. Shapes cartridges contain many shapes with which to decorate your pages with. Licensed cartridges feature some very famous characters such as Disney princesses, the Pixar Cars, Winnie the Pooh, and Mickey Mouse. The difference between solution cartridges and the other cartridges is the fact that solution cartridges have less shapes, but as a result of that they cost less. Finally Classmate cartridges have an educational edge to them with such cartridges like 50 states, and the Word Builder line. Each category is not well defined in that, they overlap with each other so it's possible to have a font cartridge with shapes, or a Disney cartridge that has (obviously) shapes on it.

Every good scrapbooking aficionado understands that the secret of the art is contained in the layering technique. Scrapbooking combines many different layers of unique paper-craft mediums such as background designs, photographs, framing elements and additional decorative “flair” to bring your memories together into a cohesive artistic expression.

All of this beautiful layering used to take individuals a great deal of time in the early days of scrapbooking. In addition, many individuals were limited in their creativity to their own abilities in the areas of sketching out designs and cutting out elaborate patterns. These tasks are not easy for most people and as a result, many scrapbookers were finding themselves frustrated and unable to create scrapbooks that properly executed their artistic intents.

Therefore, when Cricut cartridges were invented that could work with an easy-to-use cutting machine to create a limitless array of scrapbooking patterns, a wide door of expression was opened to scrapbookers everywhere. Individuals no longer have to spend countless hours of labor cutting out tedious design patterns. Now, by simply popping a cartridge into the Cricut Expression and pressing a few buttons, paper designs are ready to be incorporated into your scrapbook in a matter of minutes.

From Fun to Elegant

Cricut cartridges come in a wide array of stylistic variations, allowing scrapbookers to produce cutouts that range from silly to chic. For instance, some licensed image cartridges offer a large number of Disney character patterns, SpongeBob SquarePants patterns and other widely known children’s characters. However, cartridges are also available that offer gorgeous calligraphy, lovely seasonal designs and intricate monograms.

Whether you are making a summer scrapbook to remember family fun in the sun or you are constructing a wedding scrapbook to share with friends and family, there is a Cricut cartridge that can get the job done. The Cricut cutting machine is designed to cut precisely with materials as common as children’s construction paper or as delicate as Japanese rice paper.

Ideas Galore

When you purchase each individual Cricut cartridge, it comes with a booklet of ideas to help you incorporate all of the patterns available on the cartridge into your scrapbooking projects. In addition to this booklet, the internet is also saturated with sites that are dedicated to sharing scrapbooking design ideas. Many sites can show you creative and unique ways to layer your cutout patterns and pictures so that you can create multi-dimensional memory books that are a pleasure for friends and family to view.

There are also a large number of scrapbooking forums and message boards that exist for the sole purpose of allowing scrapbookers to share their ideas with one another and to review the different scrapbooking tools that are available on the market. These sites can help you to determine which cartridges will be best for you to use with any given project and will also give you some ideas as to what color schemes and layering techniques might work best with the particular assortment of patterns available on any given cartridge.

Where To Begin

With such a large number of cartridges available on the market, it can be overwhelming for beginning scrapbookers that are not sure where to begin. The best place to start your Cricut journey is with the cartridge that comes with every Cricut. The original Cricut machine comes with George and the basic shapes, the Cricut Expressions comes with Plantin' schoolbook font cartridge, and the Cricut Create comes with Don Juan font and shape cartridge. These cartridges will give you an assortment of basic designs to begin with and will allow you to get familiar with how your machine works, as well as how the selection process plays out once you insert your cartridge into the machine.

Once you get the hang of how it all works, the real fun can begin! Try different paper types and colors to bring a great deal of creativity and individualized charm to every new scrapbook page. And whenever you feel the urge to expand your creative horizons, remember that there are always more Cricut cartridges on the market from which to choose.