Saturday, June 16, 2012

Father's Day Cards 2012

Cricut is offering five free Father's Day card designs through June 19 in their online program, Cricut Craft Room (CCR).  Thank you Provo Craft for having these!  They were really easy to make.  This is also the first time I downloaded the desktop version of CCR and cut from it.  It was a fast download and cut on the first try.  I had absolutely no problems with it - joy!

Here are the two I made: (This card is standard A2)

I only did very minimal decoration to these cards.  On this one, I glittered the word "Greatest", inked "World's" and "Father" and added five brads along the bottom. 


And the second:  (This card is 5x5")

Some of the things I added to this cute golf card are a white brad for the golf ball, inking of brown (a bad job here I know - my StazOn brown is acting really weird...), and some Trendy Twine.


I hope all the dads out there have a wonderful Father's Day!!

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Learn and Play -Cascading envelopes

Wow - May was a crazy month!  I was so happy with all I got done on National Scrapbooking Day and the week following but then I didn't have a chance to make anything the whole rest of the month!  It was the last month of school and I am so happy to say now it is summer!  I am looking forward to staying home with my girls and getting my yearly dose of stay-at-home mommyhood!

To end each year, I make the group thank you card for our daycare sitter.  She is a phenomenal lady and we like to get her a gift for taking such great care of our kids all year long.  We are all teachers and she is a teacher's wife so the school year only schedule works great for all of us! I have made a word book and an exploding box in the past.  This year I saw something called cascading envelopes and wanted to give that a try. Here is the final product:

There are five envelopes, one for each child plus a final envelope for the parent thank you.  I decorated the envelopes by adding the phrase "Learn and play at Tara's" down the fronts of the envelopes.  I used the DCWV Animal Crackers paper stack for the background papers.

Learn from Out of Character at 2.75"

& from Letter Envy at 2"

Play from Out of Character at 2.75"

@ from Letter Envy at 1.75"

Tara's a mish-mash of letters from Out of Character, cut between 2" and 3"  The shadows are hand cut.

In each envelope, there is a thank you from the child. On one side is their picture (my daughter pictured here) and on the other side is their thank you along with a drawing from them.

The back side of the envelope looks like this:

When the whole thing is folded up and wrapped with Trendy Twine, it looks like this:

And from the side:

One thing I learned a little too late is that the thicker your project, the more envelopes and embellishments, the farther apart you should glue your envelopes.  I really would have loved to have my first envelope seem farther apart so it doesn't bow so much but live and learn. :)

She enjoyed it and I hope you do too!

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Thinking of You Mom

With Mother's Day closing in, I used one of the NSD challenges to come up with an idea for a card.  This meets the requirements of the Cricut Circle Something Old/Something New challenge.


The challenge required using a newer cart and an older cart, as well as two Cricut cuts.  The newer cart I used was Kate's ABCs for the hat at 2.5".  The older cart was Walk in my Garden, which I used to replace the original flower on the cart with something a little more spikey.  That flower was cut at 1.25".


I placed the original flower from the hat on the inside.  The sentiment is from Pink By Design.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Bug Eyes layout

Today I am sharing a layout I made with you.  This layout fits the requirements of the Recipe Challenge on the Cricut Circle blog.


This was when my daughter and a friend went to a butterfly garden.  They had a ball with these bug eye glasses!  My daughter is the lower picture and I just love her little toothy smile!


The recipe was:
At least three Cricut cuts: Create a Critter bug at 2" and 3", Birthday Bash for "bug eyes" at 0.5", and George for the rectangle journaling box just in case the two bugs only count as one :)
Three patterned papers: all American Girl stack - there is a separate pattern paper under the journaling block - a little hard to see here
A butterfly, bird, or bug - from Create a Critter
Machine, Pen, or Hand-stitching - This was an adventure!  I think I need to get some lighter thread for it to work well in my sewing machine...
The color yellow - matting and in the bugs


I hope you've enjoyed this layout as much as I do!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Life's a Stitch card

I created this card for the Art Inspiration Challenge on the Cricut Circle blog.  We were to take this photo and use it for inspiration:


From that came this card:

Another of the requirements was to have three Cricut cuts.  I used Pop Up Neighborhood for all of the cuts here.  Hot air balloon at 3", Milkman at 1", and clouds at 2" (actually flower tops from a layer).


The papers are all from a KaiserCraft collection.  I used my Sew Easy to make the holes for sewing, however it didn't pierce my paper so I ended up using my sewing machine to make holes, then hand stitched it all.  Hand stitching takes forever!  Ugh!

The stamp is from Pink by Design.

All in all, this card took a different direction than it had originally started but I still sort of like it :{


Saturday, May 5, 2012

Family Reunion Layout

The second timed challenge for the Cricut Circle!  This time it was a sketch challenge.  We had to use the sketch provided, create something new within the two hour time slot, and use at least two Cricut cuts.  This is the sketch that was provided to us from Jana Eubank:


And here is the layout that I created:

Here is a close up of the letters:

Cricut carts I used:
Carousel for the letters at 1.25".  I choose this font because it matches what was on the pattern word paper.
Lovely Floral for the Reunion and 2011.  Reunion was welded on my Gypsy and is around 1.3".
George and Basic Shapes for the white circles at 1.75".


I hope you like it!  The other side of this layout will eventually be lots of other photos from the reunion and will use the same color scheme.  This may be the fastest I've ever created a layout that is more than just matted photos!  :)

Thanks Circle for all of the motivation in the last two days!

Friday, May 4, 2012

Letter Envy M Notecard

Timed challenge for Cricut Circle - will be back to add more details later!  :)

Used Letter Envy for the M, at 1.75".