Today I shall show you my Cricut cover. I have had a Cricut Expression for I think 3 years now, and I do love it but it does not get used every day and so does tend to get dusty. I have noticed how much more dust we get in the house since we had wooden floors put down...

When round at my friend Effie's house I noticed she had a cover over her Cricut that she had made, good idea thinks I....and here we are about 2 years later LOL

So first of all, a few weeks ago, I took some sheets of paper, lay them over the cricut, drew the shape onto the paper and faffed about with it, trimming the paper and pinning in place till it fit, next i *ahem* left it hahaha It looked great with it's tatty paper cover!!! ok so it didn't but I get bored easy, and it could wait for another day...or week...

Eventually, I took off the paper, unpinned it and cut some fabric using the paper as a pattern. My fabric was just an old off cut in the cupboard, and wasn't quite long enough, so I had to piece it.



Then I hemmed the bottom and fastened on a piece of elastic underneath at each end, this just slips over each end and keeps the cover down.


So far so good, but it looked awfully plain, the greeness looked like a meadow, which of course needed flowers.

I don't have a large flower sizzix, so i cut these flowers and leaves freehand from calico, then painted each piece with gesso, 2 coats back and front. Before painting the leaves I folded them and did a little seam from the bottom to about halfway, just to give a little dimension to them. This is not a quick job, drying takes a while, and it's boring...well ya know what they say about watching paint dry...



So onto another day, lol, I swiped the flowers and leaves with various Distress ink pads..now these wont dry on here, so you can smudge them around till you get a pleasing background colour. They do eventually dry, but are not 'set' so if you wet them the ink will come off. I then used navy stazon to add my images, using background stamps and word stamps. I also found out some flowers for the centres.

The material is not hemmed, I wanted them to look a little rough around the edges.



Next I stitched thru the 2 layers of painted calico, and the paper flower centre with some gold seed beads. I also machined around the leaves with a zigzag stitch and some gold thread. Lastly i painted the paper flower petals with shimmerz.





In the photo above you can see cording at the bottom, this is about 6-7 lengths of different fibres, twisted slightly and fed thru the machine under a zigzag stitch, again with gold thread. This binds all your fibres together and gives you a machined cord.

here they are all stitched on,by hand, to the cricut cover. The wide ends of the leaves are tucked just under the cord to hide them,then stitched, and the narrow ends are stitched down aswell, but not flat. Give the leaves a bit of height by arching them slightly and then catching down.

This is a handy compromise between using paper(too flimsy) and using patterned fabric (too restrictive in what you can do to it, ie: inking and stamping. I mean i wouldn't want to ink over expensive quilting fabric lol) the calico doesnt need hemming, will not fray further after painting, though you can hem for a neat edge if you wish. I first used this method when making birdies with Effie, you can see them HERE.

I am sure there are a thousand uses for painted calico, if you come up with one let me know.