Our grandson tried Soccer this spring - it was not a good fit for him, but it made for some excellent photos for Grandma! :)
I finally got to use the Sports Mania Cricut Cartridge. I had a lot of trouble cutting the soccer ball itself. First, I couldn't seem to cut all the way through the cardstock. I changed my settings and then the cutting itself went fine. I set the pressure to max and slowed down the speed, and then also increased my blade setting to 4 (it used to be on 3). The next problem I encountered was that the blade starts and stops at a really narrow spot on the soccer ball itself. I had a terrible time trying to get a decent soccer ball off the mat. In fact, I never did get a really good one. The one I finally used, I wound up putting a glue dot underneath the weakened area.
I had no trouble with the "Kick this" cut on the second page. I did wind up buying a single soccer ball stamp from Hobby Lobby, and used that to stamp a background on the second page.
For the "Coach" cut on the third page, I used a standard image from the cartridge, which included a whistle. I didn't want the whistle, so I just trimmed it off. Since I wanted to include the girls' pictures on this page, I also wanted to add some pink to the page, so I used a background corner cut from Sports Mania to cut the pink. I added the large green brads (from Oriental Trading Company). I just repeated that same layout on the fourth page. The little girl on the fourth page was so not interested in playing soccer - she just wanted to try and sit or lay on her soccer ball. She was so funny to watch!
For the last photo, I used two soccer ball brads (from Hobby Lobby). At the top of the page, I stamped and embossed my soccer ball stamp, cut it out, mounted it on a black circle, and used Stampin' Dimensionals to raise it up a bit.
