baby boy card

My husband's cousin just gave birth to a precious little guy about a week ago and this is the card that I made to congratulate her and her husband. The cut is from New Arrival. You can either weld 2 together to make a card or, if you don't have access to Design Studio, you can cut 4 blackout shapes. 2 will be for the front and back-then you will need to glue some strips of paper to those pieces to act as a hinge for the card. My hinges are where the bow is tied and at the wheel. The other 2 blackout cuts are glued to the inside of the card. They serve 2 purposes. The first is to hide the hinges. The second is to make the card sturdier.
After the card is assembled, it's time to decorate the front. You'll need to cut out another baby buggy-this time without the blackout feature selected. Your last cut will be the baby buggy with the shift on. For finishing touches, I added a string of pearls, a bow, some skittles on the wheels, and the heart above the buggy, attached with a small gauged wire that was shaped by wrapping it around a pencil.
Thanks for looking!

Ventura Beach and some exciting news!!

Here's another layout of Ventura Beach. I used a sketch from Page Maps for it. I love the clean lines of it and the balance that the squares give to the row of photos. I used SCAL to cut out the title and Life's A Beach for the sandals and dolphin.

Now...for my exciting news...thanks to Joy over at Obsessed With Scrapbooking, I have won a Cricut Gypsy!!!! Woot woot! She announced yesterday that she would give away a Gypsy when she reached 1,000 Facebook fans--which she reached and then WAAAAY surpassed yesterday and today. In fact, the last time I looked, she had over 1,500 fans! Check her out--she always has the latest and greatest in Cricut products to demo on her personal blog as well as the blog that she co-owns, Everyday Cricut. Thanks, Joy! I cannot wait to receive it and start playing!

Thanks for looking!

fire engine

Jonah had a Drive-in night at Cubbies last week, and each kid was supposed to make a car to sit in during the movie. Since he's very much into firefighting right now, (dressing up, making siren noises, and putting out fake fires all over the house) we thought we'd make him an engine that he could sit in for that night but also continue to use at home to "spark" his imagination. Scott designed, cut, assembled, and painted the entire engine but he tasked me with the job of cutting out a maltese cross with my trusty Cricut. I found the cross here, on the Quilling Patch.
It was a big hit with Jonah, and we are sure to hear plenty of siren noises throughout our house for a long time!
Thanks for looking!

Dig dig dig dig...

One of the things that Scott enjoys most about being a daddy is the excuse to do fun things because the "kids" like to do them. The truth is, Scott loves to dig. He likes to dig BIG holes. But it would look kinda funny to see a grown man dig big holes in the sand by himself. He is thrilled that the boys are at the age where they are also interested in doing things like this. When they were finished with this hole, it was big enough for 2 people to sit on beach chairs inside. I couldn't even see Jonah and Noah inside unless I was standing over the hole. I'll let you guess who had the most fun that day. :)

The journaling reads:

"Q: What do little boys* do at the beach?
*{big boys too}
A: dig dig dig dig dig
dig dig
dig dig dig dig.."

Here's a closer look at the first page:
and page 2:
The words were cut using a variety of ttf's on SCAL. The silhouette on the first page is from A Child's Year. The shovel and pail are from Life's A Beach. I used stickles for the sand and also added a little bit of "sand" to the corner of the shovel. I feel kind of silly mentioning Printing Press, but I did cut the two asterisks from it! :)

Thanks for looking!

Ventura Beach

I love how this page turned out! The pictures are actually printed in color, but with the sunset just right and the silhouettes on the beach, they looked like they were printed in black and white. I used 1 piece of shimmery paper for all of the embellishments. The charms along the side are from Life's A Beach and the letters are a ttf "traveling typewriter." It is a little hard to see, but on the arrow I used some letter stamps. It says "LOVE," pointing to my 3 favorite boys at the time. I'm so lucky now I have 4 boys to love!
Easy page. Thanks for looking!

Dad's Birthday

Monday was my Dad's birthday, and my boys got him flower seeds to plant in his garden. I whipped up a little gift basket to put the seeds in and a quick card to complete the garden look. Here are the results:

Side 1:

Side 2:Side 3:
Side 4:
I used A Child's Year on all 4 sides of the basket. Two of the images are with the icon feature selected.
The basket itself is an .svg file from SVG cuts. The basket can be found here. It's designed with a slit in the handle so you can slip a place card in there, or in this case, a birthday card, like so:

Speaking of card, have you neglected (like I did) the card feature on A Child's Year?? This card was super easy to make...no welding necessary. It is straight from the cartridge and was cut with a simple press of the button! I thought it would be cute to have the card in the shape of a butterfly so it could be fluttering above the garden scenes. I added stickles to embellish it to look somewhat like a monarch and voila! Easy gift-giving. The entire project took probably close to an hour but could be replicated in less time (except for waiting for the stickles to dry).
Thanks for looking!

thank you cards

To complete the train theme for Jonah's birthday, I sent these thank you cards to our guests. The engine was from the same train I made for the "pin the caboose on the train" game at the party. It is cut from the My Community cartridge. I handwrote the greeting, "thank you so much" with various colored markers.
The card base is 4 1/4" square and the white squares on top are about 4" square. I used the corner rounder on them and inked the edges.
Thanks for looking!

Disneyland vinyl scrapbook

Well, I have a few more scrapbook pages to share over the next few days but I've not downloaded them from the camera yet and someone is borrowing it right now, so those will have to wait.

For some reason, I've been unable to log in to my blog all week until today. I think it has something to do with the Firefox updates but hopefully it's fixed for good now since I'm in now!
In the meantime, I was looking through older projects and I don't think I ever posted this one. I still need to print a picture small enough to replace the Mickey silhouette, but I love how the vinyl turned out on this. I used the Wall Pops from Lowe's that were on clearance last year. I used SCAL for the font.

Thanks for looking!

Jonah's Train Birthday Party (picture heavy)

Our oldest turned 4 a couple of weeks ago...hard to imagine. He said he wanted a train party, and I was happy to oblige! I got right to work on my Cricut, using My Commuity, Everyday Paper Dolls, Mickey Font, and SCAL. Here's a sampling of the decorations:

Railroad crossing sign. Letters cut with SCAL using Lucida Grande true type font:

RR crossing sign using SCAL (Lucida Grande again):

All Aboard sign using Everyday Paper Dolls (cut at 8 1/4") and Mickey Font:

"Happy Birthday Jonah" sign using Mickey Font (letters cut at 3") and embossed with Cuttlebug's Happy Birthday folder. I ran a black inkpad over the raised image to get the look. I forgot to take a close-up of a letter to show the detail. Next time.

We played a variation of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey"...Pin the Caboose on the Train! Here's the engine, cut from My Community, and the engineer from Everyday Paper Dolls. He's supposed to look like Jonah (well, as much as a paper doll can, anyway):

Here's the passenger car using the same cartridges.

And here's one of the cabooses. The cabooses served as the child's placemat as they arrived to the party. We served lunch first. The kids had pb&j sandwiches cut into train shapes with a cookie cutter. My wonderful hubby was in charge of lunch for the adults...delicious BBQ pulled pork sandwiches with broccoli salad, potato salad, fruit salad, and deviled eggs. Sooo yummy! Anyway, after lunch we played the game and the kids used their cabooses.

Each caboose was personalized with a paper doll representing each child in attendance. My dad got one, too, since he's a train fanatic...hence the "Grandpa" doll with gray hair. Here's a picture of all of the dolls before they were attached to their caboose:

And here's the game ready to go. Letters are from Mickey font. I traced the caboose with a Sharpie marker so the kids could know where to aim:

I made cupcakes for dessert, and continuing with the train theme, here are the toppers with toothpicks glued in between the shadow layer and the top layer (again used My Community and Mickey Font):

And here they are displayed in the cupcakes. The letters kind of get lost in the picture but I think they were easier to see in real life:

And...how could I not include a picture? Here is Jonah and his friends!
And here is a link to our friend's website who is a photographer. She was kind enough to come take some pictures for us! Didn't Rachel do a fantastic job? By way of background, we were going to have his party at a local train park museum where there are real locomotives for the kids to climb on and run through. However, rain was forecast so we had to have the party at our place. Our living room is not big enough for the number of guests, and we knew kids at a party would want to run around and have a good time...so we converted our garage into the party area. A garage is not the easiest place to take pictures and I was so happy when I saw how well these turned out!

Thanks for looking!

smile

Here's the last card in the series: a free standing pop-up card. I used Paisley for the frog and the smile, and Storybook for the squares behind the frog. I used stickles to embellish the sentiment and the heart on the frog. I inked the edges of the green base in white. Patterned paper is DCWV.

Here's a picture of the card folded flat for mailing:
To open it up, simply pull on the purple tab. There is room to write a greeting on the back of the card. Here's a picture that shows one card flat and the other opened:
Thanks for looking!

XOXO

Aww, this little elephant is just too cute! Like I said in a previous post, I just fell in love with the images on the Paisley cartridge while doing this project! If you like this style of card, it is called a surprise pop-up card, and you can find the directions here.

To reveal the sentiment, simply pull on the tab on the top of the card:
You can write your greeting on the tag that pulls out on the top:
A side view:
One last picture, showing the card closed flat to mail and the card opened up:I used stickles on the sentiment, on the envelope's heart, and around the edges of the white mat. What a cute and simple card for Valentine's Day, eh?
Thanks for looking!

woot woot

Today's card is a slider card. When you pull on the tab at the top, you get an extra surprise when the hidden tab on the bottom also slides out. How is it done? Smoke and mirrors...and if you don't believe me then you can click on the link for directions!
The cute little owl is from Cricut's Paisley cartridge and I cut out a perch for him from the Storybook cartridge. The background is embossed using Cuttlebug's Swiss Dots folder. The sentiment, "woot woot" is also from Paisley.
Here's a picture to show the sliding action:
Cute, eh? I'm a sucker for cards that move or are in some way interactive. I've got 2 more to show you this week, so I hope you'll visit again!
Thanks for looking!

You put the "fun" in fungus

Whew! I got a little distracted last week from my blog because I was spending my free time making decorations for my son's train party. He turned 4 years old yesterday-amazing! We had a fun little party for him in our garage; we were going to have it at Travel Town (a local train park) but it was raining yesterday so we switched to plan B. My Cricut was chirping every day last week to turn our garage into a more festive environment for his party. I'll be sure to post pictures when I'm finished posting the cards.
So this card is a swing card, or flip flop card. When you pull on the two sides of the card, the center flips over to reveal your message. This is what it looks like:
For the center, I layered pink on pink, inked all the edges in white, and hand-stitched a border on the top layer. The mushroom is from Paisley. I used almost all DCWV paper and embellished with stickles. I used Martha Stewart's Scallop Dot punch as a border and made my own photo corners.I placed the sentiment in the corner so it would be visible whether the card was "flipped" or "flopped." I used Paisley for the circle and the scalloped circle with a difference of 1/4" (real dial size turned ON). I cut "fun" out from Sesame Street font at 1/2" and used stickles on it. The shapes are outlined with a very fine Micron pen.
Thanks for looking!

just be you

How cute is this little monkey from Paisley? When I saw him I envisioned him doing antics across the top of a card, and I knew that a spinner card was just the thing for this little guy!

Here is a picture to show the movement of the card...see how he somersaults?
One more...it's so much fun! I liked the sentiment 'just be you' for this card (it's paired with the giraffe from Paisley) because the somersaulting monkey is playful and unique...not exactly what you'd expect on a greeting card. The monkey is cut at 2 3/4" and the sentiment at 2". The patterned paper is from DCWV.

Thanks for looking!

i ♥ u

I knew I liked the Paisley cartridge when it was first released with all of its cute and whimsical cute, but I didn't know if I would use it a lot because I wasn't sure if it would be very versatile. Well, I fell in LOVE with it during the course of making these cards! I liked it so much that I also made a set of cards for myself (hey, the materials were already out!!!) This card is a joy fold card. I don't want to steal someone else's work, so you'll have to click on the link to be directed to the instructions. *Note* I used the instructions for the first variation shown at the bottom.

The joy fold card has a flap that you open to reveal the card. Here is a picture showing the front of the card in the background and the flap opened in the foreground.

And here it is opened all the way. There is plenty of room to write your greeting. The border punch is Martha Stewart's Scallop Dot.The top flap has to be tucked behind something to stay closed. I cut out 3 circles (3/4") and I cut out "i ♥ u" (1/2") from the Sesame Street font cartridge. They are on pop dots, and this allows the flap to stay closed.
The giraffe is cut at 4". I used stickles on the centers of the flowers on the giraffe and on the heart and around the circles. All paper is DCWV.

Thanks for looking!