Meet the Cricut Cartridge, "Paper Play"

 
Today we are going to look at one of Cricut's newer cartridges, Paper Play.  This is not your standard Cricut cartridge in that it is project oriented rather than image oriented. To elaborate, this is the description on the Cricut website:

"This cartridge is filled with fun little projects such as puppets, dolls, and a cootie catcher. With Cricut Projects cartridges, you can create unique and customized projects for your home, family, and friends.  The versatility of the cartridges will surprise even the most imaginative crafters"

I agree that you get very unique projects with this cartridge and they really are darling. There is a randomness to the cartridge however, because they are not within a single motif, but because I have kids and work with kids, almost all of the projects are relevant for me. 

I'm a big kid at heart so immediately after bringing this cartridge home, I created the car.  My kids were really impressed and said I was the best artist in the whole world.  I just love that!

 I used my Imagine so instead of cutting out each element with different colored pieces of paper, I just told my machine what colors I wanted and it printed and cut the entire project on a white piece of card stock.  I do not recommend using a heavy weight cardstock as it can be a little too bulky for some of the folds.  I used a heavier weight cardstock on the car and it had problems holding its shape.  I scored all of the fold lines and I used Tombow glue to adhere it together but the paper still had some "bow" to it and eventually some of the seams came apart. The middle weight cardstock is much easier to manipulate while still be durable enough to support itself.

Above is a view of every one of the projects on the cartridge.  

The first 19 pages of the handbook show each of the projects and the layers you need to cut to construct them.  Pages 20 through 51 offer picture instructions on how to assemble the projects.  The instructions are very similar to the ones you get with furniture from Ikea.  There are no written directions, just a graphic of each stage of the assembly as you can see below:

Above you see an image of the Nestling Doll project (R) and the different layers you will need to cut to construct it (L).  Below each picture of a layer is a picture of the cartridge overlay with the key you will need to press to cut that layer, highlighted in red.  Below are the step by step instructions on how to assemble the Nestling Doll project

 

 I found these instructions fine for assembling all of the projects except for the darn cootie catcher.  I've been trying to figure that one out all summer and I still cannot make it work.  There are 6 year old kids out there whipping cootie catchers together with binder paper and I can't seem to assemble one with step by step instructions!  In my own defense, these cootie catchers have bits and pieces glued on them so the bulk makes the folding a little more disagreeable.

This is a link to the PDF version of the Paper Play handbook on the Cricut website.

Last but not least, here is a list of all of the images (there are not any phrases) on this cartridge with their page numbers.  If you find any errors in the spreadsheet, please let me know so I can correct them. If you would like to share this information on your blog, instead of copy and pasting this info, please paste a link to my site. The spreadsheet below is a JPEG but you can download a PDF version of Paper Play here: 

  PAPER PLAY TABLE OF CONTENTS PDF