I opened up my Cinch a while ago and I played with it a little but I never finished a “real” project. I had an idea in my mind but the time to make it just never came around. You know how that goes…don’t you? (I feel like I’ve been running from one deadline to another the past several weeks and not getting a whole lot of anything “non-essential” done.)

THEN I saw the darling post over on the Crafts Unleashed blog by my pal Lisa Falduto where she did “The Cinch for Home Decor” post. At first I thought “Dangitall, that’s similar to what I had in mind” but then I thought “Great minds think alike”. And Lisa is a paper crafting master (check out her blog to see what I mean.) So that puts me in pretty good company, yes?

You can see that my ADD is running the show today huh? 😉

Anyway…seeing Lisa’s project gave me the push I needed to make the project I had in mind.  So here goes.

The idea I had in mind was to make a Happy Birthday banner that held a photo of the birthday person. Not just for ONE person but to make it a perpetual banner so that I could change out the photo of the birthday boy/girl.  I mean, who wants to make this six times over? (There are six in our family…just to clear that up a bit.)  🙂

So I pulled out a bunch of paper in colors that I wanted to use. Aren’t they amazing? The paper with the glossy pattern is from Bazzill Basics they are; Wallpaper – Raven, Diamonds – Parakeet, Polka Dot – Everything Surf. I ended up not using them but I still thought they were beautiful papers.

The papers with the mixed media images are from Jenn Mason‘s Piece of Cake papers and I’m madly in love with them!  Just sayin’.

I covered four pieces of 6″ by 6″ Cinch chipboard with the Piece of Cake papers. I chose sections of the papers that I liked best and adhered them with my Glue Runner Pro.

And then with my Crop-A-Dile Corner Chomper I added a decorative corner to all of the pieces.

The Crop-A-Dile cut through the chipboard and paper corners with NO PROBLEM and I love the extra touch it added to my banner.

I also used my regular Crop-A-Dile to punch two holes in the very top panel to add ribbon for hanging.

So the next thing to decide is how many holes I want and where I want them to bind my pieces together. That is one of the features I LOVE about the Cinch. This is my first binding tool so I don’t have anything to compare to but I LOVE this thing! 🙂

My advice is to practice a couple of times on scrap paper that is folded or cut to size (What a great way to use up some junk mail!) to get the placement of the holes right where you want them.

And then use the back of the machine to CINCH it all together.

One of my FAVORITE Cricut Cartridges is PRINTING PRESS and one of my favorite things to do with Printing Press is to mix and match all the letters.

I actually wrote down all of the combinations of keys I used for each letter so if you want to make a banner just like this shoot an email to creativegoddess (at) vickiodell (dot) com and I’ll get the magic combination over to you… just because I’m cool like that. ;0)

And then I used Canson Photo Corners to hold a 4″ by 4″ photo of the Birthday person (where you see the white square) .

No birthday banner is complete without a little sparkle. Even though the boys outnumber the girls in our home 4-2 I think even they will appreciate a banner with a little extra “something”.

I used my banged up box of Glue Dots to add sequins to the bottom of the cake and the bottom back of the very last panel.  Plus I scattered some sequins and gems here and there on the rest of the banner.

I can’t wait to hang this for the next family birthday… which just happens to be MINE!! LOL! 🙂

For a review of The Cinch please go visit my friend Jenny at the Craft Test Dummies blog. If you aren’t sure if The Cinch is something you need in your craft closet she’ll give you the low down. It’s a great review and points out all of the pros and cons for you. I think you’re going to want to put this on your Christmas list!