Out of this world birthday card

I’ve been doing some more coloring with the Copic markers that Husband bought for me for Christmas, and this is the first completed card (aside from some lunch box notes for V!) that I’ve made.

I used the Space Cadet set from Paper Smooches to make the cute little alien ship and the planet, and I white heat-embossed the starry background for inside the window.

That set doesn’t have a birthday greeting, so printed my own onto the card front, which I created with my Silhouette SD using the print-and-cut feature.  I used the fonts Hiragino Sans GB and Nightly Poem (the brush script).  I also added the detail of a thin black line around the circle window by using the offset tool and changing it to be a non-cut, printed line.

I assembled the card using a lot of craft foam for dimension!  I like how it gives the look of the cute little alien flying right out of the opening!

 

I’m linking this up to the Paper Smooches’ January 2018 “Anything Goes” challenge!

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Christmas joy cards

For Christmas, I wanted to do something special for the teachers of our kids’ classes at church.  They give selflessly to teach our children, and in addition to a small gift card, I wanted to do something a little more hand-made.

The design of these cards was inspired by Laura Vegas’ project HERE.  Even though the design on my version is actually fairly simple, it took me a surprisingly long time to get it right, haha!

The wreath was a cut file Kerri Bradford offered this year during her 12 Days of Christmas, and the “Joy” in the middle was another, much older cut file from Kerri Bradford, too!  I added some extra branches from an oldie-but-goodie fern-ish looking leaf file to which I seem to come back over and over again.

Because I wanted even more dimension and texture, I mounted the wreaths on a rectangle of textured white cardstock, which I sprinkled with gold Heidi Swapp Color Shine (I’ve been watching a lot of Inkie Quill!).  And then I added a little lift to the rectangle by adding a smaller cardboard piece underneath.  I didn’t want the cards to be too thick, but I definitely wanted some emphasis on that center piece.

Did I mention that we have just over 20 teachers?  I made a lot of cards!  After I worked out the design, I really enjoyed putting these together.

 

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Crafty stenciled T-shirt

A little while ago, I saw these cute stamps and thought to myself, “I want a t-shirt that has some sort of crafty saying on it!” I loved the saying “make your own magic,” and seeing all the little crafting tool icons made me think that scissors would be perfect for me– since I love sewing and paper crafting so much.

I designed the image in my Silhouette Studio software, using the font Bruselo Script, which I purchased as part of a bundle from The Hungry JPEG.  I used a number of special characters and did a bit of playing with letter sizes and spacing to get everything just so.  I modified a star image to create the sparkle stars around the saying, and I used a scissors image that was part of a NSD cut file freebie from Scrapbook and Cards Today in 2015!

Once I had my design laid out, I flipped it for its mirror image.  I used freezer paper with the shiny waxed side UP on my cutting mat and cut it out with my Silhouette.

I ironed the freezer paper stencil onto my T-shirt, which was about $3 from Walmart.  There were lots of little fiddly bits to fit into the letters, but I watched some scrapbooking videos while I worked and had a happy time!

I used two coats of white fabric paint over my stencil before I let it dry overnight.  I am so pleased with how it turned out!!

 

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Multi-color stripe cards

Near the end of April, my kids and I were watching crafting videos during lunch (as usual).  We came across a video from Jennifer McGuire (one of our favorites), in which she created rainbow backgrounds for cards using colored cardstock scraps.  My daughter (age 5.5 years) was intrigued, to say the least, and honestly, so was I!  She suggested that we make those cards, too–which is a frequent refrain, though not always possible.  But today, it was completely possible!

I sliced up some cardstock scraps into strips of varying widths and presented V with a bundle of them, along with two halves of an 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper, pre-coated with adhesive.

During her quiet time, she worked away at adding strips of cardstock to the under-layer of paper, and at the end, she had enough striped backgrounds to make four cards!

She used two of the backgrounds to make cards for her Bible study teachers.  She wanted to mimic some of Jennifer’s designs, and so I cut out some butterfly designs that she chose, using my Silhouette SD– the base layer is vellum, and the detail is plain white cardstock.  She decided on the arrangement and wrote her notes inside.

We have lots of paper strips left, and I am looking forward to making more– with V, and also making some myself!

 

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Princess Party: cupcakes

We did cupcakes for the party!

I thought about doing a large decorated cake for the party, but after thinking about all of the other things we were trying to accomplish (did I mention that we put the whole thing together in a week, not counting the invitations and the thank-you cards?), I realized that was particularly unreasonable.  Cupcakes seemed easier!

In fact, it played (no pun intended!) perfectly off of another one of my daughter’s favorite playthings–Disney Princess Cupcake Party Game (<–similar; affiliate link used).  This game is adorable (and actually has a clever game mechanic), and she loves just playing with the cupcakes themselves!  They’re like little Disney-bounding baked goods.  🙂 I managed to sneak a photo of the Rapunzel cupcake and I recreated it for her party.

The gold frosting is buttercream, and I made what felt like gazillions of royal icing flowers to sprinkle on top.  I cut out sunbursts from light yellow cardstock with my Silhouette and sandwiched a toothpick between two of them as a cupcake topper.  The cupcake wrappers are from Hobby Lobby, and my mother-in-law helped me locate the perfect color!!

I was so delighted: when my daughter saw them for the first time, she immediately exclaimed about how they were the cupcakes from her game!  Highest praise, indeed.

Stay tuned for more about our daughter’s princess party!  

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Layout: our gifts 2009

I think this is the last page for my 2009 scrapbook album!

When I was thinking about how I would arrange this layout, I had originally chosen a different layout to use as inspiration.  However, when I opened my album and looked at the pages around where this one would go, I discovered that one of the layouts just a page or two later had such a similar sketch that I thought it would be awkward.  I went to my Scrap Pinterest board and scrolled through, looking for something that would use my landscape 4×6 and 3×4 photos.  When I came across this one by Stephanie Buice for Crate Paper, I knew it was just right!  I trimmed my 4×6 to a 4×4 and it was perfect.

I’d say that I followed the inspiration layout pretty closely.  I pulled out my (dwindling supply of) Christmas papers and started layering scraps under the photos until I was happy with how they looked.  (I sort of coordinated the colors with the rest of the layouts in the Christmas 2009 series, and especially the layout on the facing page of the album.)  I pulled coordinating embellishments from my (dwindling supply of) Christmas embellishments and tucked them here and there around the photos.

The title is cut with my Silhouette SD– the very same one I’m holding in that photo!  It’s seven years old this year, and I have gotten SO much use out of it.  It is a fantastic little machine.  I used the font “the Nightly Poem” from the Hungry JPEG, and I stretched it a little bit to make the word have a more horizontal feel (the font itself has a very vertical aesthetic, I think).

I even imitated the machine stitched frame around the focal photo+paper+embellishment block, but also added some hand-written journaling under it.  I didn’t add ink splatters (I forgot, plus I didn’t have an appropriate color), and the background was looking bare to me.  I added a simple strip of patterned paper to the left edge and two rows of stitching, and suddenly the layout looked bound and finished.

Supplies:
textured creamy white cardstock
patterned papers: BasicGrey “Nordic Holiday” and Crate Paper “Peppermint”
embellishments: BasicGrey “Nordic Holiday,” Lily Bee “Christmas Town,” as well as miscellaneous other sources
alphabet stickers: October Afternoon Mini Market

 

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Layout: family gifts 2009

Who would have thought that I would go on a Christmas layout kick at the end of September?!  Certainly not me, especially since Christmas layouts are usually what I dread most!

And so, this fourth (and unfortunately final– Friday was filled with non-crafty tasks that really needed to be done during nap time, and even spilled out into other parts of the day!) layout from my scrapbook-every-(week)day challenge to myself in the last week of September is also a Christmas layout.

I started out using a layout I admired for inspiration, but in the end, the only evidence that remained was the block of patterned paper in the top half of the layout!  Ha!  The amount of shifting and maneuvering of photos and patterned papers was ridiculous for such a simple result, but I must say, I really, really like this layout.

I had no clever ideas for a title, so I relied upon a cardstock sticker from the Crate Paper “Peppermint” collection kit– it was quite large, much larger than I would normally use for a sticker on my pages.  I used some lime green striped washi behind it (it looks yellow in the photo above, but it really is green) to tie the brighter yellow-green into the more leafy green of the main block of patterned paper.

I embellished my otherwise simple layout with leafy sprays and pine branches die cut with my Silhouette.

At the bottom of the page, I made another little embellishment cluster around the gift tag I wanted to showcase– the journaling on the page tells the story of this funny label that says “Dad wanted no part of this”– my mom had picked out a black, white, and hot-pink-patterned purse for me, and my dad didn’t want any of the credit, haha!

You may also notice that I included some doilies to embellish this page– they are not from my (in)famous box of 1000!  I recently acquired my Grandma’s paper doily stash– it seems as though my infinity for paper lace is hereditary 🙂

Supplies:
patterned paper: Crate Paper “Peppermint”, BasicGrey “Nordic Holiday”
creamy white cardstock
embellishments: Crate Paper “Peppermint” cardstock stickers; BasicGrey “Nordic Holiday” cardstock stickers; washi tape from Bella Blvd and the Paper Studio; the Paper Studio enamel dots; paper doilies
Silhouette SD: Silhouette Design Store “sled and sprig” #52368 and leaf_1033
other: Scotch ATG, craft foam, Project Life 0.3 black journaling pen

 

 

 

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