Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Rockin' Star Card


Here is a card I created using the brayer technique on glossy cardstock. I used a versamark stamp pad to randomly stamp a star image and then went over it with a brayer inked with red. Then, I randomly stamped a black star over that. I cut the star out with the Home Decor cricut cartridge and covered it in black glitter. Enjoy!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Sesame Street Pop-Up Birthday Invitation


Ok, here we go! For my first project to post I have decided to post the invitation I designed and made for my son's 2nd birthday party.

He LOVES Sesame Street and when I bought the Sesame Street Friends and Sesame Street Font cricut cartridges I had his party planned in my head already. I think his birthday was probably about 9 months away--maybe I just needed an excuse to buy the cartridges?? ;-)

This invite was also the first project I did on my new Gypsy!! I will give you step-by-step, detailed directions on how I made the invite.

Step 1: First I "layed out" all of the parts to Big Bird on a 12x12 mat on the Gypsy screen. Big Bird and all of the parts were cut at a height of 10.23. All of the pieces will cut proportionately to each other. Example: If you cut Big Bird's body at 10.23 his eyes, tongue, etc will also need to be cut at 10.23 to fit his body correctly. If you don't own a Gypsy or Design Studio you could probably cut all of the pieces at 10 1/4 or 10" and it would probably fit just fine on the card. Just make sure you do not use the "Real Dial Size" button or you will really get eyeballs and other parts that are actually 10 1/4"!

Then I layed out the paper to cut on the mat and cut the pieces out. It is much easier to load all the different colors for all the cuts and make all the cuts at the same time. You save so much time loading and unloading the mat. (Thanks for showing me this awesome time-saver Pink Stamper!)After the images were cut, I just put them together. The pieces you should have are Big Bird's background in black, body in yellow, tongue and eyelids in dark pink, eyes in white, smaller part of tongue in light pink, and eyelids in blue. Note: I threw away the pink parts to Big Birds legs because they will be hiding behind the card so I didn't want to mess with them.

Step 2: Next I moved on to the easy guy: Elmo! I did all of the same things as above on Big Bird, except he was cut at 5.14". I cut out a black background, red body, orange nose, and white eyes. He was much easier than Big Bird. Not so many pieces!! Put him together just as you did with Big Bird.

Step 3: Now onto a harder one: Oscar. Repeat all of the steps as above. I cut him at 6.26". He should have a black background, white eyes, green body, brown eyebrows, pink tongue, and grey trash can. The hardest thing about Oscar was cutting out the green body. His green fur was so intricate that my paper kept tearing. I tried everything but in the end, I opened a brand new mat and that helped.

Step 4: Cut out two pieces of black cardstock 5 1/2" x 8 1/2". On one of the pieces of black cardstock, tape down the three characters with part of their body hanging over the edge. You may have to experiment with this a bit before they fit right. You are going to want them to fold down without hanging over the edges of the card.

Step 5: Adhere the next piece of black cardstock on top of cardstock with characters. Making sure the edges align properly.

Step 6: Cut out Sesame Street Sign with the height set to 1.53". You will cut out the background in white, the sign in green, and the outside border in yellow. Adhere them together and apply them to the top of the card. Here is a screen shot of how I layed them out on the mat.



Step 7: I cut out the letter "M" for my son's name and the number "2" for his age. Then I welded the word "Birthday" together with my Gypsy. All of these items were cut at 1 inch. I put the pieces together and then typed out an invite. The invite I typed was mostly trial and error. I printed it out several times before I got the spacing right for the "M", "2", and "Birthday".





Step 8: Using a bone folder, fold the characters over the edges of the top black cardstock and lie them flat so the card can fit into an envelope. I used a greeting card envelope that is 5 3/4" x 8 3/4".









Phew!! That was a long one. I hope I explained it well enough and I'm sorry if I rambled on. For the birthday party I had planned on making party favors and decorations with these carts as well, but I am a procrastinator and I ran out of time!! Let me know if you have any comments or questions. Thanks for checking it out.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

2010 is on a roll...

Am I really going to start this?? Guess so! I've decided to start a blog mostly b/c I love going to the Cricut messageboards and it seems like everyone has a blog!! I would love to post some simple projects I've done with instructions but I'm not very computer savy so I thought it would be easier to just create a blog, and send any questions here.

My main goal for 2010 is to scrapbook a page a day. My house isn't big enough to have my own scrapbooking room so I scrapbook at our dining room table. I find myself not wanting to drag all of my supplies out unless I'm going to get a lot done. So, after I decided on my goal, I set up a card table in the corner of our dining room and I'm going to leave all of my supplies there. If we are going to have company I always know ahead of time so I can just put my card table away before they get here. Anyways, my point is that since my supplies are out in the open I have found it much easier to sit down and create a page here and there. So far this year I have completed 18 pages. So...I guess that means I'm a day ahead. Woo-hoo!

So, my goal of this blog is to somewhat journal/somewhat share crafty ideas. Hopefully this will help me stay on track with my goal. It's probably going to include a variety of all different kinds of things, from pics of my kids, to scrapbooking layouts, to card making projects, to ...??? We'll just have to find out!