Tag / crafting

by Nancy at HisThumbprint

CURIOsity

As promised, I’m going to talk about the Silhouette Curio today! This is my latest addition to my fleet of Silhouette machines. I started with the CAMEO in December of 2015, added the Mint late last year, and just in the past couple of months, the Curio has taken up residence on my desk. Truth be told, the desk was bought because of the Curio. I had run out of space on my little makeshift desk.

My original thought when buying the Curio was that it could etch, stipple, and emboss and that might open up a whole new world to me. And I’m sure it will. When I get around to that. Right now I’m using it for the same old thing I used the CAMEO for. Cutting card stock and vinyl. What I find funny is that my favorite things so far about the Curio are a lot of people’s least favorite things about it. The tray, and that it only cuts up to 8 inch width materials. The CAMEO cuts up to 12 inch materials and I admit that’s nice for a lot of things, and I still use it a lot, but…

I make a lot of onesies, and other assorted baby and toddler clothes. Those have become my main focus lately. I have one friend with a 7 month old, one who has a 4 year old and is about to have another, I have a 6 year old grandson (not a toddler, but his clothes are still not that big), and I make onesies and bibs for the Value Life Ministry at church. Because the Curio cuts smaller things,  handling the tray is a bit easier than the CAMEO cutting mat. Most of the time I still can cut designs for several things at a time anyway. Also, the tray is firm and when I load it in the machine, I can often leave it in between cuttings. I just pull it out some, take off what I’ve cut, put on the new vinyl or card stock, push it in a little and hit the button. Ready to go. The CAMEO mat is floppy and 12X12 so I get things stuck to the wrong place on the mat all the time. All. The. Time. Plus, you have to line it up right. There’s no way to line up the Curio tray wrong.

In summary, if you’re thinking of getting a cutting machine, go with a Silhouette over a Cricut and the CAMEO does have a larger cutting ability. But, if you think you’ll just be doing small things for small apparel or maybe scrapbooks, I think I’d start with a Curio.

Here are a couple of shirts I made for my friend’s daughter on the Curio-just so you can see some of it’s handiwork! (yes, I know they need ironing)

Thanks for stopping by again today! Have a great week!

~Nancy

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by Nancy at HisThumbprint

Life is CRAZY Sometimes!

I’ve been on ‘vacation’ for the past week and I go back to work tomorrow. This is the first chance I’ve had to actually post something here! That makes me sad. However, I’ve spent a lot of time reading some books that I want to talk about on here. One in particular on the book of Ruth, but also a couple others that are intended to help with blogging for Christians and inspirational writing. We’ll see how all that goes! On my list of things I wanted to get done this week was to write several posts and schedule them out some. Yeah, nope. Didn’t happen. I did, you may notice, if you’ve been here before, upgrade my site and change the theme.

As I mentioned in my last post, some cool things have been happening as far as teaching. My small group leader has asked me to teach at our retreat in the fall! That is a big honor for me and I’m very excited! So, if you’re a praying person…keep that in your prayers!

Also, Alpha will be starting at church next week and I’m going to be a table leader again! I haven’t for a while because of work and location. It has always been on a weeknight and that’s just too much for me these days, with work being exhausting. It was also downtown for one session so that would have put me home pretty late. They’ve moved it to Saturday afternoons at the church (5 minutes away) so I’m totally available and really excited!

Back to life being crazy…yeah. What can I say? I’ve felt so out of control lately. Like everyone else is running my life-and I don’t mean God. He’s allowed. People pull me in this direction or that and I haven’t any time to get things done that I want to do (such as this). I’ve battled depression my whole life and I swear it’s felt like it’s been winning lately. As I type that, I stop and think about the things God is doing in my life and wonder how I can feel depressed. But honestly, I know as well as anyone that depression doesn’t always make sense, nor does it always coincide with life events-although they do tend to have some baring on it. I believe Satan tries to use depression/anxiety to derail me from God’s cause. I’m holding dearly to that fact while I wade through this current storm.

We’ll talk more about that later! Just glad to be back on here and I’m PLANNING on being here a lot more!

(oh-and for my craft and Silhouette friends-my next post is going to be related to that!)

Love to all of you!

~ Nancy

by Nancy at HisThumbprint

Take a pause

 

I’ve not posted a lot, I know. I was working on some projects, work has been insane, and well, the shipping fun. More important than that is that I started to question how much I wanted to do this business.

I suppose everyone who starts a business has that feeling at one time or another, especially near the beginning. It gets frustrating. Things aren’t selling like you were sure they would. Customers have complaints or ‘suggestions’ with no regard to the fact that you look at your crafts as art, not  just ‘stuff’ you make. It sucks the wind right out of you. Trust me.

Time to pause

I decided to take some time and really give this some thought. Was it worth it to me to feel the stress I’d been feeling? Was I putting the stress on myself? Yes, I believe it’s worth it, with some change in my perspective. Yes, I’m putting some of the stress on myself.

forest-for-the-trees

I think most of my crafts from here on out probably won’t be ‘custom’ and if they are, there will be very little that can be customized. I want to create and if people like it and buy it, then that’s awesome!

Sometimes  you just have to make the decision to make your business the way it makes YOU happy. I’m not doing this for a living. Just for fun! I need to keep it that way.

Thanks for visiting with me today! I’ll have a few more things up on the shop soon!

Have a great week!

~Nancy