The Second Cricut Cartridge for 2016

Just a quick post -- it's Valentine's Day and I have things on my mind other than writing. ProvoCraft released a new cartridge this week, Signature Script Fonts. It consists of 7 informal fonts that look like they're hand done.

As for utility, I'll have to leave that up to people other than me. I generally don't put words on things, and I'm not much into monogramming, so it's really outside my area of knowledge.

From a onetime font designer's perspective, it includes a nice range of fonts. Assuming the Cricut page shows them in order by name (the manual doesn't seem to name them at all), I do rather like the one called Fudge; it's a nice bold brush-style font that, if I were going to put words on things, I would probably use for those words. Ginger, the next one in the image, is a quirky flare serif font that I like as well, though I can't really imagine what I'd use it for. As I've said before, I'm not quite the typical papercrafter, so I'm less interested in fonts than I am in, say, fossils.

The one thing that would concern me if I were to used these would be the very thin lines of many of the letters, especially on the Cantilever and Catamaran fonts. They would require extra care to remove them from the cutting mat without tearing. While several of the others are also thin, they are formed of less complicated lines and less likely to cause problems in that critical removal process.

It's already available on eBay from the unacknowledged Cricut outlet (the one whose PayPal receipts list ProvoCraft as the payee) and, as of this writing, on sale on the website for $19.99.

And another one...

When I wasn't paying attention, ProvoCraft sneaked out another new Cricut cartridge! This one is All Occasion Box Cards. They don't even have the handbook linked on their page yet -- it's on mine, of course, and you can get it here. So far, you can only get this from ProvoCraft directly; their unacknowledged eBay outlet isn't offering it yet.

At first glance it seemed like a rather limited cartridge. It has designs for 30 different 3D cards, plus an envelope. Then I got started thinking how I could swap some of the parts around, combine something from this and something from that, and make totally different cards. This looks like a good one.