Hello Kitty Card Set

Here's the group of cards I made for my son's physical and occupational therapists. They did such a great job working with him over the past couple of years and we are so thankful for the progress he has made. I used the Hello Kitty Greetings cartridge on the "card" feature for all of them. To make them thicker and to hide where the fold lines are, I also did a basic black cut to adhere to the front of each card. They are all made to fit an A2 envelope. I used stickles on all of the images except for the butterfly card.Rainbow, cut at 3 1/2"

Heart, cut at 3" and embossed with Swiss Dots

Sun, cut at 4 1/4"

Hello Kitty, cut at 5 1/4" (her whiskers need a slight trim to fit in the envie)

Cherries, cut at 4 1/2"

Flower, cut at 4 1/4"

Strawberry, cut at 5"

Butterfly, cut at 4 1/4"

and a homemade gift box to wrap them in, courtesy of Splitcoast Stampers' resource page.
Thanks for looking!

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!