What have I been doing?

It appears as though I haven't been doing anything crafty for awhile, but in reality I have been taking 3 online classes through Jessica Sprague trying to learn how to use my new birthday present to myself, a Silhouette Cameo.  I have a Cameo at work where we teach kids how to make vinyl stickers...but until I got my own, I never realized how much that machine can do!  It is true, "You don't know, what you don't know!"

The three classes I have been taking are here.

I took Getting to Know You, Oh, the places you will go and I am in the middle of Designer Studio Edition.  That is the one I have been the most excited to try since it apparently teaches you how to use digital cuts files, although I haven't gotten that far yet.  There is a bit of homework involved...and if you are like me and haven't taken a class in many, many years...it took a bit of time to figure it all out.  Here is the final project I made for the second class.

 It doesn't look like much, and it is something I could have made myself provided I had all the dies and stamps, but I made it all on the Cameo.  You even lay the whole thing out on your computer screen so you can see just where everything is going to go, what color it will be, etc.  My favorite part is the circle background.  It started off with just a single circle.  Then you add another circle, then a star, weld it together, replicate it a bunch of times, squeeze it all together and finally cut it down to the right size.  Whew.  It took a while.  The layout is one that came with the class and I got Warren to come in and take a picture of me (notice...no makeup-less face is showing!)

 The chevron stripes are print and cut files...you just print them with registration marks on your paper and then the machine automatically knows where to cut it.  Very neat!  The little banner was one of the tasks in the lesson and the think.think.think. tag was made with a rounded rectangle and I added the type and color...printed it and again, the machine cut it off.

I also made a tag on the machine..it looked just like this one, only with no score marks, so I ended up using a PTI tag I liked better.  Honestly, the only independent thought I added to the project was the Lil Inker mini bow, just because I think it is cute.  I plan to frame this and keep it up on the wall in my craft room as a reminder of the many hours I spent trying to learn how to use my machine!