You Take The Cake ~Cricut Imagine~

You Take The Cake

Hey all! This is Leah from Beeing Creative and Feeling Cherry and today is my very first day at She's a Sassy Lady! I am excited to be a part of the team here and look forward to sharing projects of all types with you. Today I have for you my very first project using the Cricut Imagine! After reading so much out there about Provo Craft's newest toy release, I was not too sure what I was getting into. Now after getting to know this new machine, I am pretty excited about it! I hope to share some Imagine insight with you, somehow to's and maybe take the guess work out of the machine for you guys.

Now my first tutorial is all about the printing part of the Imagine. We all know it's a die cut machine on steroids but there are some neat possibilities with the printing part of it. This sweet card (for my husband on Valentine's Day) comes from the Yummy cartridge. Now we all know that you can print images, how I think of it is printing something more like what you see on a greeting card from the store. You can print a single layer image or cut in layers like I did here. You can change to colors/patterns of each layer but for this example, I would have lost the words on here had I changed the color. So I went with cutting in layers what was shown on the cartridge.

There are many different settings for the Imagine machine but the first thing I really noticed was being able to print in Draft Quality or Best Quality. When you first are getting used to the machine, I say to save the ink and use Draft Quality!

Hit the Menu button and go to Settings.

On the left side you have some options, the second is the print quality, choose Draft Quality.

Now here is something I had not seen online. There are some shapes saved on the Imagine without any carts put in. I chose the very first one. The pencil on the top left on the highlighted image is how you alter the image (change colors, patterns, sizes, etc.)

There is not an option for a pattern to use since no cartridge is in the machine but there are some plain colors. I chose this blue and printed in Draft Quality.

This photo shows you the 3 layered images and the blue background as printed in Draft Quality

And here is the card all dolled up! You can of course print in Best Quality and the image will stand alone but why not print in Draft Quality, save some ink and spruce up the images yourself!

I used a paint brush and distress inks to water color my cupcake. I love how it turned out and how you can really make it any color you want! I used Spun Sugar for my frosting but the very slight print behind it still shows up. I added some Crackle Accents to the cherry on top. You can also see what Distress Inks do to the blue background and the pink piece.

I used Broken China to give some color to the blue die cut and then clear embossed with Background Basics: Hearts by Papertrey Ink. After that I used some Faded Jeans distress ink and made sure to whip off anything that might have been over the embossed hearts. I used only Versamark ink the stamp the kraft card base.

Now the wording on here still needed something so I used an embossing pen to draw over the sentiment, You Take, and embossed with clear embossing powder. I also used the pen to add some embossed dots to the piece. The Cake was kept as is with some blue and brown distress inks on the corners.

I hope this gives you a ton of ideas how to make Draft Quality printing work for you on the Imagine machine. I love that you can still get something printed but you can take it a step further in making it your own!
I hope you enjoyed my first project, thanks for spending time with me.