Covered in Glitter and Screaming

My illustration pen pal loaned me another  Griffin and Sabine book , and I returned it with a letter and a puzzle. I already had a mandala design from a workshop years ago, so I started there. I made some tweaks and printed it out to decide what the colors should be like. Thanks to radial symmetry, I could get four different looks on the same sheet. Top: white background, rainbow shapes on left and metallics on right Bottom: black/white shapes on rainbow background left, metallic background right  Puzzles are made of chipboard (what hardcover books use, a little more hardcore than a cereal box) Let's feed that into the Cricut and see what happens Good news: the Cricut can handle drawing all the lines at this size, and it will successfully cut out all those puzzle shapes Bad news: all those frayed edges are not gonna work for me Second attempt: puzzle re-drawn and re-cut on two sheets of cover stock glued together instead of chipboard. A little less solid, but much smoother! An...

I shaved my head for charity last year. For a small number of donors I offered thanks in the form of a mystery gift, built around a theme of their choosing. This generous donor's theme was ensō, also described as the  zen circle . The final product is made of card stock with gel pen accents and silver paint in the center. I had a conversation with her once about a number of symbols that were important to her. I started with the symbol she had for herself, and arranged the others to radiate outward. This was a fun challenge! A lot of image research/tracing, a lot of meticulous design, and some arguing with the Cricut about how much detail it would allow me to have in my cut paper shapes. I started with the flowers and hummingbirds, doing research and image tracing as I added each layer. Lots and lots of tweaking, tracing new images and trying them out, changing the number, rotation, and configuration, layer by layer. Shout out to this tutorial for applying layer...