Friday, August 15, 2008

College and Recital Word Books





I participated in a word book challenge on the Cricut Message Board and today is the day for "revealing" our files. Mine are pretty simple - there were some amazing creations designed by the talented people on the message board!

Here is a LINK to the original thread where some of the books were posted as the designers finished them and you can find the thread where the other files were posted HERE . Many thanks to Joann Caraballo for organizing this swap!



The first book I did was "College." I placed the pennant on the front so that a smaller cut of the appropriate college name could be added. Of course you can choose the colors that represent the school - I used the colors of my alma mater for this sample! I chose the font from Cuttin Up for a more casual feel - I thought of this as a book for photos of college friends. The pennant is from Locker Talk and could be deleted if you don't have that cartridge - you could then cut the college name and place it vertically on the front page, allowing room for binding.



Next I did "Recital." After years of piano lessons as a child (and young adult) I think of it as a piano recital but you could change the papers and perhaps add a cut to make it work for a dance recital as well. I used the Teardrop font for the letters because the "drop" parts reminded me of musical notes. There is a page in the file with some extra musical note cuts from the Stretch Your Imagination cartridge which are optional but could be used to decorate the pages. You will see that they go with a singing bird and I rotated and moved most of the design off the mat to try to cut only the notes.



For the test cut example I used black and white musical note paper but found the overall effect a bit busy and so substituted black on alternating letters. (So now I will have to do an opposite version to use up the note pages I cut as a test!).

In order to make these as useful as possible I created them using both George and Plantin Schoolbook. They are sized at 5 x 11 so will fit on either an Original Cricut, the new Create (you will need to have George or Plantin Schoolbook or adapt the design using a square/rectangle from a cartridge that you own) or the Expression.

Since I am totally occupied with family birthdays this week I have not finished embellishing and have not bound these yet (I think it is easier to work with the flat pages before binding. I just wanted to get them posted today and will add more photos of the finished books when I get a chance to finish them up!

Here are the files for each design - Enjoy these!

College Word Book - George

College Word Book - Plantin Schoolbook

Recital Word Book - George

Recital Word Book - Plantin Schoolbook

5 comments:

  1. Love your designs!! These 2 books are awesome- thanks for all you do for the "rest of us" (I really appreciate the time and effort!!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great Job on both!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the files, these books are so neat! I have a younger sister who just graduated high school and I think I might try to adapt the college book to say graduate or her school name or something. It's so nice that you take the guesswork out for all of us, otherwise I would probably never make one of these word books. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The colors of your alma mater? Florida or Boise State? or some other college bold enough to choose Orange and Blue?

    ReplyDelete
  5. It is actually Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

    I think there are many more with this combination - it is rather bold!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. I love to hear from the people who read my blog. I moderate all comments to keep spam off the blog without making you decode the squiggly letters so your comment may not appear immediately.