Cupcake saga continues

My latest challenge from The Paper Variety was to make something involving a cupcake. Oh how perfect since I’ve spent the last two weeks in cupcake land. Well I couldn’t just submit the cupcakes that I already made. That wouldn’t be in the spirit of a crafty challenge. I had to figure out how to incorporate those cupcakes. I decided to make a cake plate out of paper to display my cupcakes in my scrap room. I’ve been decorating my scrap room in a “Creative Cafe” theme and these little delights will be displayed to spruce up my space. What better way to present paper cupcakes, than with a paper cake plate? So here it is…

I used my Gypsy & Cricut to design and cut the stand. If you really want all the complicated details read more below. The stand was a little off from what I had envisioned. If I feel up to it, I will enlarge the circle plate at the top to make it more in proportion to the size of the stand. Other than that, it was a fun project and a neat way to decorate my space.

Recipe:
I took the letter L from a font (can’t remember which one). I flipped it horizontally and welded the L and the upside down L together. Then I flipped this vertically and welded then together again for form half of the stand. I cut two stands–each was 4 layers of heavy cardstock glued together that all fit on one sheet of cardstock. I sliced a slit in each stand about half way down and then slid them together. I don’t know if any of that made sense. I really should have taken photos for a better description.

Make something yummy challenge

As I’ve said before I have a plan for prettying up my scrap space. For a long time I have had a sketch on my cork board of my “Creative Cafe” complete with awning, welcome sign and menu plaque. In keeping with the food theme I created a pink cake box and placed it on an actual bakers rack that holds my printers & some supplies. I didn’t post a picture of the box because it didn’t turn out well. But what I do have a photo for you of are these yummy cupcakes…

I created these both to fit with my new room theme and to enter the Make Something Yummy challenge over at My Pink Stamper. To create the cupcake wrapper I used a pattern that was in the Jan/Feb ’11 issue of Paper Crafts Magazine (and available for download here). I then ran the wrapper through my paper crimper, starting from the middle and doing each side separately. This helps the crimping to stay as straight as it can be. I used my Cricut to cut a 4″ circle and fringed the entire edge of the circle in about 1″. Adding a line of adhesive from my ATG gun all around the fringe, and across the entire surface, I then maneuvered the circle to fit inside the top of the wrapper. This gave me a solid base to adhere my ribbon to. I twisted and folded my ribbon as I wound it around the cupcake to create fluffy icing. I topped it off with a rich pink button threaded with green twine for that sweet cherry on top.

So go whip up some of your own crafty cupcakes. Enjoy!

MPS Blog Hop & Challenge

Robyn over at My Pink Stamper hosted her first blog hop last week. The goal was to follow the hop, gather the clues and then post a project based on the clues to her blog. You can check it out by starting at her blog hop post and follow the first link!

It took me a while to get to my project. I decided to use the work that I am doing for my daughter’s 4th birthday. She wants a Spongebob birthday so that is what we’ve been working on. We are transforming the garage into Spongebob land, complete with flower-power background, Seanut Butter and Jellyfish Jam to snack on and other lovely decorations & games. I used my Cricut to make the transformation!

Craft Room Decorating & My Pink Stamper Challenge

Hey everyone. I wanted to share this project with you today. I made these sweet photo flowers for two reasons. The first is that I am on a mission to decorate my craft space. Since I work in the unfinished basement I don’t have the prettiest of spaces. As you can see here, my craft table faces the furnace and water heater. I LOVE my space but I am getting tired of looking at the utilities. So, I’m starting to do something about it! Then today Robyn, over at My Pink Stamper, posted a message saying she is looking for 2 members for the next term of her design team. In order to apply for the position I have to create an item following her challenge: use the cricut and the colors of pink, green and brown. So I decided to create a room decor item to spice up my space. Keep reading and I’ll show you how I made these flowers and give you some ideas of what else you can do with them!

Recipe

cardstock: Bazzill and Stampin’ Up
pattern paper: Stampin’ Up and Hot Off The Press
spray inks: Tattered Angels & Clear Snap
die products: Circut using Plantin Schoolbook
foam adhesive: Therm O Web

Steps

1. Use the cricut to cut your photos into 2″ circles. There are other ways to do this, but this is my favorite method. Choose photos that have the focal image that is about 2.25″ square. Next, create a template that you will use to line up and cut your photos. To make the template, place a scrap piece of cardstock carefully along the guide edges on the upper right of your mat. This part is important because it is going to help you line up your photos correctly. Load your mat, paying attention to where your mat sits flush when you load it (mine sits more to the left of the little guide bump). Insert your mat, choose the circle from the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge and cut once at 2″ (I used the real size feature to be sure my circle is really 2″). Unload the mat. Carefully lift up the top right corner and slip your photo underneath. Move the photo around until it fits how you like within the circle template. Be sure to trim off any of the photo that overhangs the mat! Lift away the template. Load your mat just like you did when you cut the template, then cut that 2″ circle again. Remove your photo, replace your template carefully on the guide lines and repeat this process for each photo you want to cut.

2. Choose papers for your flowers. I decided to make the flowers have two layers with a center circle to hold the photo. I chose pink papers for the girls in the family and green papers for the boys with brown paper for the center. Each flower has a solid cardstock as the bottom layer and a pattern paper as the top layer. I cut the flowers at 5.25″ and the center brown circles at 2.5″ again using real dial to be sure they come out the size I expectt. Everything then got a good spray of shimmery inks. While the pieces were still wet I crumpled them up and then smoothed them back out to give them more texture. After they dried I assembled everything, using pop dots to lift up the center of the flower just a bit.

3. I decided to mount these flowers on the edge of the furnace ducts. The sheet metal of the ducts will act as a nice backdrop for the flowers. I used one of my favorite products, 3M Command Hooks velcro-type strips, to attach the flowers to the ducts. That way if I get tired of the flowers or the placement I can remove the 3M strips from the items and move or replace them. The 3M strips have a removable adhesive that can be replaced with refill adhesive strips. Below you can see what the strips look like and how the look mounted to the ducting. And finally you can see how all the flowers look all lined up.

If you don’t have ugly ducts you need to hide, you could mount these straight to a wall, use them in a scrapbook page or how about this idea… Attach each flower to a colored craft stick and add a leaf (also from Plantin Schoolbook). Then stand all these in a shallow vase with foam in the bottom. Add a ribbon to the vase and display this never-wilt bouquet!

I hope I have inspired you to create some home decor item! And I’ll keep you posted with photos as I add on to my furnace camouflage project!

Happy Holidays

Wishing you the warmest of winter seasons both physically and emotionally.

More Advent

So I have been busy working on various craft projects for the holidays. I wanted to show you the finished results of the Advent projects I worked on. First off we have the rest of the earrings my daughter and I made. She managed to design and put together a couple of pairs all on her own.

The earrings, along with our other Advent goodies have taken their place on our Advent wall. You’ll notice a bunch of little boxes hanging on a card on the right side of the photo. Those are boxes I created several years ago. This year we filled them with the earrings.

The other elements of our advent wall: a Countdown to X-mas sign, advent note cards for my son, and down on the bottom right, large envelopes hanging on a binder ring. You can see an example of how the envelopes are simply decorated since a few are sitting up on the mantel. The envelopes are filled with resurrected Playmobil toys that we dug out of storage. They belonged to my older two children and now they are being passed on to the youngest in her Advent calendar.

A detail shot of the countdown sign. This was one of the first projects I used playing with my new Gypsy. It was great to weld letters together to create a continuous phrase instead of gluing individual letters down!

I added a Merry Christmas tag to the bottom of the advent boxes since the original one was missing.

The note cards below I made for my oldest. He said this year he didn’t really need an advent calendar. He is at that age where toys are much less appealing (unfortunately he has moved onto expensive video games!) I was just happy that he didn’t get caught up in the greedy “they get something, so how come I don’t” mentality. He was very mature and understanding. But I still wanted to do something for him. So I made these note cards. Each day has a little message tucked into it. Some are just love notes and some are “treats” (like staying up late). I enjoyed making it and I think he is enjoying finding what his message will be each morning.

Happy holidays to everyone, in whatever way you might celebrate them!

Entering Contests

These past couple of months have been the beginning for me of trying to get my work out in the public eye. In an earlier post I said I was able to have one layout featured on a popular blog. That is a start! I’ve also tried to get a short design team position as well as entering a card making contest. Neither adventure turned into anything, but it sure was interesting trying. Here are some of the projects I used for the two contests.

If you have ever thought of publishing your work, don’t be afraid to try. The worst thing that happens is that you spend a little time and money on your work and they say no. Its not the end of the world!

Here was one of my entries for a Cricut-based blog’s short-term design team. I took a shape from the Storybook cartridge and turned it into a photo frame by cutting and gluing multiple layers of cardstock together. The final layer had the frame cut out of it and decorated with pattern paper.

The card making contest had 5 themes to enter. Here are three of my 5 entries…

Spring layout

I submitted this layout to The Paperlife blog for their spring themed feature. I just saw this morning that Amy over there decided to use my layout! Yeah! And thanks Amy. So I thought I would do a post on the steps I took to make this layout.

All the flowers in my yard are so spread out that it is hard to enjoy them all at once. So I wanted to bring all the pretty blooms together in one place. I began with the idea of a grid of 4 photos, each 4×4 inches. Then I wanted to support the color in each photo by matting them with coordinating pattern papers. Sorry this next photo is a little blurry! The top two papers are from Basic Grey and the bottom two, as well as the cardstock base, are from Stampin’ Up.

I decided I wanted to contain all the flowers within a large circle. Circles really are my favorite element right now. So I pulled out my Cricut Plantain Schoolbook cartridge and loaded in a sheet of Stampin’ Up cardstock. Using the centerpoint feature on the cricut I moved my blade to the middle of the mat, cut one large circle and then cut one circle that was about 1/2 inch smaller. This left me with a circular ring to use on this project. (The leftovers are a sheet of cardstock with a circle cut from it and a large circle that I will save to use on other projects.) I took that cut ring and laid it on my layout, moving it around until I got the placement I wanted. I ended up placing it on top of the photos and then tucking it behind a bit of the photos and mat at the top.

I then wanted to flood the edges with pretty flowers. But I also didn’t want to detract from the photos so I went with small neutral flowers. I used my Cricut Pagoda cartridge to cut out a bunch of flowers from cardstock. Then I used Glimmer mist to spice up the flowers in silver, pearl and latte. I crumpled up the flowers for added texture and placed gems, pearls and buttons in the center to finish them off. The final touches for the page were the tabs at each photo to label the names of the flowers, the title cut out of vellum with the Cricut Opposites Attract cartridge, and the date handwritten with my favorite Uni-Ball Signo white pen.

Scrapbook Calendars

I have been recording small daily tidbits since my first child was born. I took a regular dollar-store type calendar and just wrote notes on it. I recorded the big things like my son’s first steps to the small things like taking an extra nap that week. When I approached memory recording in such small chunks I didn’t feel like I could fall behind. While my journaling was up-to-date, it took me years before I took this approach with my layouts! I felt so far behind until I started using BLANK calendars to do my layouts AND my memory recording.

I now approach my scrapbooking a month at a time. I look over my photos from the previous month and choose photos to tell just one story for each child from that month. All the other stories are already recorded in the calendar journaling format! I don’t feel like I have to capture every interesting story in a full scale layout. I hang my calendars in the living room and it acts as an ever changing home decor item as well! You notice in the finished layout below the binder ring at the top used to hang the calendar in the house and the spiral binding at the bottom that holds all the pages together.

I got my first calendars from Stampin’ Up, though they only carry desk size calendars now. There are many companies that make calendar items such as 12 x 12 calendar paper from Creative Cafe available at Two Peas in a Bucket or the Year of Memories Keepsake Calendar by SRM Stickers available from Addicted to Scrapbooking. I’ve never used those products but it is something to get you thinking about what is available. Check your favorite LSS or online retailer for more items.

I used the 81/2 x 11 calendars to start with. You fill in months (I used stamps) and dates (I wrote in mine by hand) in the provided calendar grid and then use the blank page to do your layout. My goal was to do ONE layout a month for each child. That was only 3 layouts a month total for my 3 kids. I felt like that fit my busy schedule!

You can see below how an 81/2 x 11 page looks tucked into a 12 x 12 album. Because the calendar pages are back to back I had to place the pages in sideways into the book to prevent some pages from being upside down. This was something I didn’t think about when I started the calendars. But I just let it go and put the pages in sideways. No big deal.

After a while I got tired of the 81/2 x 11 size and the back to back limitation. So I decided to do my own calendars. I used Microsoft Excel to create a calendar template (also available from my Freebies page). There is the original .xls formated document (calendarblank.xls) which you can open, edit and print. There is also the .pdf version (calendarblank.pdf) which you can’t edit but can print as many as you want. Now these pages are in 81/2 x 11 format since I only have a printer that allows me to print that size. You can use the smaller page to incorporate onto a 12 x 12 layout, use it on a companion page for a double page spread or tuck behind a layout as hidden “journaling”.

As you can see from the photos above, I punch my calendar pages with a 3-hole punch and store the in a 3-ring binder. I used tab dividers to keep the pages separate for each of my kids. I keep the binder on a bookshelf in the living room for easy access. I even tied an ink pen onto one of the binder rings with some ribbon so I would never have to go looking for a pen.

I plan on adding in a calendar section for general family stuff –all those layouts that apply to no one child in particular, to my husband, to myself or to all of us collectively. This will bring my total monthly layouts to 4. A very manageable number I think. If you are like me and really like to stay chronological and up-to-date you’ll appreciate this method. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

Valentine’s Day centerpiece

I spent some time today repurposing some items around the house to make this fun Valentine’s Day centerpiece.

Supplies:

Sticks, find what you can repurpose!
glue (I like Zip Dry)
hearts in various sizes with a slightly large backing heart for each one
container with a foam block fitted in the base
filler greenery

I began with a Christmas centerpiece and removed the decorations leaving just the greenery and candle. I then used some plastic sticks from a Christmas fruit bouquet to create the heart “flags”. I used my Cricut (Plantin Schoolbook) to cut hearts from pink paper scraps in sizes ranging from 2.5 to 1.75 inches. I then cut backings from plain white cardstock using the shadow feature. The plastic sticks were sandwiched between the front piece and the shadow piece. I then just randomly staked the heart sticks in the block of floral foam at the base of the greenery.

Supplies — Items used for making the heart "flags"

You can see below that I glued the sticks in between layers of hearts. The Zip Dry glue drys really fast, won’t wrinkle your paper and is made in the US!

Valentine's hearts — Valentine's heart "flags"

Once you have all your hearts assembled, have fun arranging them like flowers in your centerpiece. If you decide to do a similar project I would love you to post a comment with a link to your picture!