Paper Dolls, or, Ode to My Cricut

On Thanksgiving Day, after a DELICIOUS early Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy-schmancy local restaurant (Sydney was all, "Why does that man keep give me more water?" I'm all, "That's a waiter, sweetie"), we finished just in time to load our full bellies into the car and drive across town to the Michael's store, which was opening with its Black Friday sales that Thursday from 5-8 pm. I had the sales flyer, which listed one of the doorbusters as Cricut cartridges on HUGE sale, and an additional coupon for 25% off my total purchase, and additionally, I was stoked that I wouldn't even have to consider waking up early on Friday.

We get to Michael's just a couple of minutes early, and there's a line waiting for the store to open, but up we trek in our fancy clothes, happy to just stand around and digest for a bit. A few other people line up behind us, and then this other lady walks up, and as soon as she gets to the back of the line she starts announcing, over and over, to whoever is listening, I suppose, that she can't believe that there's a line to get into Michael's. She just happened to drive over to pick up a few things, she announced, because she just happened to notice that it would be open, and she never dreamed that people would actually line up just to get in. She didn't even know what was supposed to be on sale, even, and look, she's just wearing the same clothes that she wore to make Thanksgiving dinner.

When the doors finally opened, Matt swears on his life that she shoved him trying to get inside.

I've never been to a store right when it opened for Black Friday before, and it actually was a little hairy, because I guess everybody wanted these pre-lit artificial Christmas trees that were stacked right by the door, but the beauty of being on a team is that I left Matt and Syd to grab a cart at their leisure and negotiate their way in, and Will and I dodged past the tree-hoarders and jockeyed for position in front of the Cricut cartridge display.

The other middle-aged female scrapbookers were sweet as pie there, of course, but were grabbing up cartridges like CRAZY, so Will and I basically grabbed up whatever we were even halfway interested in, too, and then took them all over to a quiet place for a closer look. I was plenty okay with the prospect of walking my unwanted cartridges back to a sales clerk for the opportunity to browse in peace.

I made some very careful choices, spent my entire remaining Cricut allowance (I'm relying on my swagbucks for my Cricut upkeep allowance), and ended up with some cartridges that the girls and I are THRILLED with.

And, obviously, they're the nerdiest of the cartridges. We turned up our noses completely at all the Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh nonsense, and ended up with, along with a couple of awesome fonts, a cartridge that has maps of the continents and countries and various icons from those locations (including lots of farm die-cuts, Willow was delighted to see--now we can make a silo!), a cartridge that does maps of the states AND their correct flags AND their correct birds (this was one of the cartridges that made me want to buy a Cricut in the first place, I'm that big of a nerd), a cartridge that does a massive menagerie of animals, and a cartridge that does paper dolls.

Hell, yeah. A cartridge that does paper dolls.

It organizes them by all these random costumes, so there's a bride and groom, for instance, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and a caveman and cavewoman (I know--whatever), and for each costume it's got a couple of options and some hair and some random stuff that would go with that costume. So, you can cut out a wedding dress for the bride and also a three-tiered wedding cake, and for the caveman you can cut out a volcano and also about four different dinosaurs (hmmm.....who do I know who loves dinosaurs?)

Needless to say, we have been playing with this cartridge ALL WEEKEND.

You can put the paper doll tabs on some of the clothes, but not, you know, the wedding cake or the palm tree or Santa's sleigh and stuff (did I mention that it has Santa and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and the requisite sleigh and reindeer and junk?), so the girls actually prefer to play with everything laid flat on the table, in these little two-dimensional scenes, and they've snookered me into cutting out for them tons of different outfits from scrapbook paper.

Here's one of Sydney's favorite outfits:
It's the shirt and pants to the groom's tuxedo with Frankenstein's hair, I think? And obviously, drawing the features on the doll itself is something of a highlight.

Here's Willow's favorite doll and outfit so far:

I'm not sure why all their doll selections manage to look sort of ghoulish AND sort of tranny chic, but there you go.

Oh, and the woman in the line in front of Michael's? Matt claims that she was checking out at the register next to us (an hour after she went in? So much for "just dropping by for a few things"), and he could hear her telling the cashier all about how she was so surprised there were so many people rushing in here on Thanksgiving, she just happened to be there herself and couldn't believe all those people standing in line before the store was even open, etc. etc.

Yes, lady, it's one of the lamest things a person can choose to do, to stand in front of a Michael's before it's even open, waiting to buy scrapbooking toys, but if you're gonna do it, hell, you might as well own it!

I wonder if I saw her again when I went to Joann's at 7 am on Saturday for THEIR Cricut doorbuster?