Graduation and Jewelry

We celebrated my nieces' graduation (one belatedly and the other current from June).  I gave them both family jewelry.  While I deemed the gifts to be nice, how to present them in a very little amount of time?  Fired up the Circut and came up with these:

I made them in about 1/2 hour total.  Seriously.  How great is Close to My Heart and Cricut?  The answer is in the photos.  They were well received, too!  ")

September Paper Trail Blog Hop: Moonlight

If you arrived here from Lynne's Fields of Finery blog, you are on the Paper Trail September Blog Hop.  This month's paper feature is the wonderful Moonlight with its wonderful fall color pallet and supported by the neutral Black and Colonial White.  It's perfect for Halloween, as I used it, but is also versatile and will be available until January 31, 2013 (wow, that number feels weird!).  I loved my granddaughter's costumes from 2010.  Every year they do something spectacular and I can't wait to see what they do this year, now that our little Katie is 5.  Don't you love the sparkly spider web cut from the Artiste cartridge?

I am loving Studio J and wanted to try to do a real comparison between digital scrapping and traditional paper cutting, stamping, and embellishments so I took the same photos to do a second layout using Studio J to compare.  Which do you like better?

Which do you like better?

Ready for more inspiration?  Hop over to Wizard's Hangout and see what Vicki is brewing up!