Having a Cricut Christmas: SuperHero Style

At this time of year I get strange ideas in my head. Strange ideas like crafting everyone's Christmas presents the week before Thanksgiving, making over a dozen crocheted turkeys for place settings, or this year, making Superhero Christmas cards. Luckily the people at Cricut are just as craft-crazy as I am at this time of year, and happily sent me a Cricut mini and their Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Supermancartridges to aid my Christmas craft explosion. Having already snagged the Gingerbread and Winter Lace Cartridges last holiday season, I decided that I could easily make some very geeky Christmas cards for my fellow geeks and family members. Given the plethora of Christmas paper around at this time of the year I knew I would have no trouble finding supplies, but I had no idea just how much fun and how fantastic making these cards was going to turn out to be.

For the uninitiated, the Cricut is an electronic die cut machine. Up until recently you used changeable cartridges and keypads to custom cut designs and lettering at home. In 2011, Cricut introduced a range of machines that hook up to your computer, and using software called Cricut Craft Room, enable you to purchase cartridges digitally and have a greater degree of flexibility and control over what you cut. Though each of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Superman cartridges have some excellent images of the characters to cut, good guys and bad guys, it was the logo cut outs that proved most useful. Using the famous "S" and bat symbols combined with some Christmas paper, it was easy to make a "Super" Christmas card. I started off simple, finding a weird kind of pleasure in using pink Christmas carol paper as the background for a Dark Knight Christmas card.

Most of my original ideas, including an "S" topper for the Christmas tree (not pictured), worked out pretty well. Using the Gingerbread cartridge, I cut out a snowman and then adorned him with a Superman costume. The same cartridge and some Superhero paper led to a pretty good "Geekmas" tree. With the Batman cartridge, my first choice was to cut out the bat symbol using some Roy Orbison pretty paper, and then affix several of them to some plain colored paper – the inside of the card reads "Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Bat!" From that same collection, the Batman mask made an appropriate card in its own right, but also made a great banner when cut from black and white Christmas carol paper. The Superman logo proved to be one of the more fun images to cut and use, and I ended up adding an "S" to a variety of Christmas backdrops, my favorite being the Ho-Ho-Ho paper pictured here.

Having mastered the simple image, I got pretty adventurous. Up until this point, the cards that I made could have been made on any Cricut machine, pre- or post-Craft Room. as they involve simple cut outs. But the Cricut mini, which runs using the "new" software, affords many options for card making that I had previously never explored:

• I was able to position the images to cut directly from the Christmas card itself, instead of from paper that would be adhered to a card. You could also cut straight from your holiday photo.
• I was able to use traditional Christmas images from my holiday cartridges in the same cut as images from my Superhero cartridges. Mixed together, not just side by side.
• I was able to re-size, rotate and skew each image, something I had been unable to do with such flexibility before.

I had hoped to use some of the pre-designed Cricut Christmas cards, and incorporate a Superman or Batman logo, but I have yet to find something that works for me. However Craft Room gives you enough flexibility to design your own, and what resulted was easily my favorite design. Using the Batman and Winter Lace cartridges for a combination card, the snow/bat storm is a beautiful cut. Though it was quite cumbersome to set up, once designed I could make multiple cuts and also save the design to come back to later. The only real downfall is the inability to share it with my fellow Geek Cricut users, but alas you have to own the images from each cartridge to recreate this card. Simplicity proved best, and an earlier attempt using a combination of the Superman and Batman logos, along with several types of Snowflake was a colossal fail.

Of course, now I had the Superhero Christmas bug and I couldn't stop at cards. Using the largest cut possible and some of the more vibrant Christmas paper I own, I was able to make a Bat Symbol Christmas banner. This even managed to get my husband, who is strictly a no-Carols-before-Thanksgiving guy, into the mood for Christmas.

As a somewhat lazy crafter, the Cricut allows me to indulge my geeky-Christmas-crafty tendencies all at the same time, and that brings on some happy holidays for this mom. My advice for those of you wishing to attempt this on your own: the Gingerbread cartridge was easily the most useful accompaniment to the Superhero cartridges, and if you already have the Cricut, get thee a Xyron Crafting Machine. This handy little device takes any of your cut images and turns them into instant stickers. Provides a much easier and cleaner stick that is perfect for homemade cards. Unfortunately for my husband, he is likely to become a craft widower, as I extend my use of these cartridges into upcoming holidays; have a Super New Year? Be my Bat-entine? Or is that taking it a little too far?

Since I can't share these images with you myself, the first five GeekMom readers to email me with their address will receive a "Geekmas" card in the mail. Just specifiy if you are a Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne fan!