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ATTENDING THE CRICUT MOUNTAIN MAKE-A-THON IN SALT LAKE CITY
Did you guys know we went to Salt Lake City? I mean we haven’t been going on and on about it here and on social media right?! Well the reason we headed out there was to attend the Cricut Mountain Make-A-Thon and we were super excited to arrive at The Grand America Hotel and get started!
As I’m sure you know, with any event the first thing you need to do is go and get yourself registered, grab a name badge, etc but this wasn’t any old event, this was the Cricut Mountain Make-A-Thon! So we were handed a bunch of stuff to MAKE our own name badges! How cool is that?! Me and Emily went for a floral design with bright pops of yellow and green.
After that it was time to go get changed into our cocktail dresses ready for an evening of wine and socialising outside, we were so excited to meet so many members of the US Cricut team that we had heard so much about and to see so many other awesome bloggers there! We knew we had an amazing couple of days ahead of us and we were not wrong!
The following day we all gathered into the imperial ballroom for the opening ceremony and you could feel the excitement in the air, it was amazing to hear Cricut talk about all they have achieved so far and how grateful they are for all the support and appreciation they get, then it got really exciting, they announced that they would be releasing 3 new products…
First, the BrightPad
This one is for all you crafters that use vinyl and iron on materials a lot, it’s the perfect device to slip underneath your design and make life so much easier when you’re trying to weed those hard to see cut lines! It’s also fab for tracing and jewellery making! Emily already has this one and uses it on a daily basic to create our sticker ranges!
Second, the Easy Press
We’ve all been there, we’ve cut out our iron on materials, we’ve waited for the iron to heat up and now we’re ironing on our design to our material, it’s a contant guessing game right?! How I ironed it on for long enough, have I moved the iron around enough? You take it away to find out you need to press down harder and do it again, etc. WELL, the Cricut Easy Press takes all of the guess work away,
Then finally, after a lot of suspense, THE CRICUT MAKER
That’s right guys, there’s a BRAND NEW Cricut machine that has been in the making for years! It handles fabrics, leather, and balsa wood with easy precision. Cuts sewing patterns in just a few clicks and holds more creative possibilities than ever! We are SO excited about this one! It’s equipped with a rotary blade meaning it cuts cotton, fleece, denim, and so much more with its gliding, rolling action – without backing material! There’s also an extra deep knife blade which can cut through materials up to 2.4mm thick (hello balsa wood and matboard!) Oh and did we mention it’s got 10x more cutting power than before?! We could go on and on about it forever but if you want to learn more about everything this awesome machine can do then you can read about it here!
Now with our minds BLOWN it was time to have a spot of lunch in the Grand Salon, this was our favourite room of the entire event because there were 5 different displays that had been beautifully designed all demonstrating different projects that you could make with the Cricut Maker! There was a fashion display with incredible skirts and more, a colourful hot air balloon styled living room, the most ADORABLE baby’s room filled with vinyl stars, a gorgeous mobile, clouds and more! Plus a party themed table (our fave since it was filled with sprinkles and paper cakes and finally a wedding dress display…with hundreds of cherry blossom flowers that had been cut out of crepe paper and really showed off the bright pad with beautiful illustrated dress designs illuminated behind! You’ll see for yourself with the photos below how amazing these were…
We spent the rest of the afternoon in classes learning tips and tricks for the Cricut design space, making the most out of our tools and learning more about the possibilities of creating amazing projects (they’ve released 50 more ready-to-make projects. Including 25 digital sewing patterns that really demonstrate what Cricut Maker can do!)
That evening was all about the 50s baby! Cricut had put on a dinner and dessert reception for all of us attending so me and Emily got dressed up as pink ladies (T-shirts made with our Cricut machine of course!) tied our hair up with ribbons and headed down for a fun evening filled with mojito sorbets, dancing and photo booth props!
The following morning was filled with more sessions, it was super handy to learn how about easy the design space was to use on an iphone and an ipad (they had classes for android users too) and we got to see the Cricut Maker in action cutting out all sorts of fabric in the patterns class! Sadly after that it was time to say goodbye to everyone in the closing session (we didn’t want the event to end!) but it was so incredible to see how happy and inspired everyone was after spending a few days with the Cricut team! We could tell everyone was itching to start creating new projects!
We were lucky enough to have an extra day at The Grand America Hotel once the event was over and as you can tell from our photos throughout this post we totally made the most of it! The pool was incredible (and the weather was hot hot hot!) they even had a beautiful patisserie full of macarons, tarts and treats, all in pretty pastels!
We also wanted to touch upon just how amazing the vegan and vegetarian food options were in Salt Lake City, we headed to Blue Plate Diner one morning for some delicious vegan pancakes and our favourite place to eat was Zest! Their food was AH-MAZING, don’t even get me started on the almond cheese guys, if you go…make sure you order the vegan pizza! Their cocktails were pretty delicious too!
But that wasn’t all we got up to in Salt Lake City, we also had chance to do a bit of a wall crawl and find some amazing murals! You can see them all here! Another highlight for us was visiting the real life Disney Up house, you guys, we can’t even tell you how incredible this house was! You can read all about our visit to it here!
So all in all we had the most incredible time over in Utah and we can’t thank Cricut enough for inviting us out there, we’re so excited to try out the new machine and show you guys all of the amazing things it can do! Watch this space! xxx
Did you get a machine? I am trying to decide if I want to go this year. Do you need to stay at the hotel? I live in South Jordan, UT and was planning on going back and forth. Any tips you can give me? Thank you! PS Your photos are gorgeous and so colorful.
Hi Kelly
We do have a machine 🙂 It was hands down one of the best events we have ever been to and we’re hoping to go again this year. You don’t need to stay in the hotel if you live local, but they do have some great cocktail events and meetups that you might want to hang around for? Well, that’s what happened last time anyway? I would just say come prepared to learn a whole load of stuff and meet some great people. You’ll have the best time!
Emily