Day 7 Back-in-action

Okay. It is day seven. It was my goal to give you a straight week of projects to welcome myself back to my blog. I hope you are enjoying. My goal is to post things about once a week. But you all know how life gets in the way sometimes. I hope to not go for months without posting again though!

So my final post for this run… Cutting a mask with the Cricut! For those of you who don’t know, a mask in an object that you lay over your project in order to prevent that portion of your project from being inked.

Sorry the picture is bad. Just trying to get photos fast to share with you. This is supposed to be a photo of a 6×6 page protector. I used a scrapbooking page protector as opposed to a regular office 8.5×11 page protector because it is slightly thicker. The page protectors are inexpensive and readily available. To create a mask, trim off the three sealed edges. This will leave you with two sheets of plastic. Place one on your Cricut mat and choose a shape to cut. I set my blade to 6, pressure 3 and speed 3. You may need to experiment with your settings. Here is what my mask looked like after I cut it (it is inked already for greater visibility).

This material is thinner than a commercial mask but it much cheaper, just the image you want and easy to make. Use it like you would any mask. However, if you find it is curling a bit, then add some re-positionable adhesive to the back. I laid mine on the corner of my project and sprayed with Glimmer Mist. This left the tan, uninked shadow of my image behind. I then spayed my mask a little more, turned it over and stamped the image over my misted section. This gives two distinct versions of the same image.

After allowing it to dry I finished my layout. Enjoy!

RECIPE
cardstock, flower punch, ink: Stampin’ Up

pattern paper: Scenic Route
spray ink: Tattered Angels
die cuts: Cricut (Storybook cart.)
marker: marvy
from stash: stamps, silk flower, crystals

New Kit Club

Super quick post for you today. I listened to an interview with Kim Garner on The PaperLife a while back and she talked about Scrapbook Chicks. This company started out making scrapbooking T-shirts and has moved on to carrying other scrapbooking products. The thing that I got excited about is that they are offering smaller subscription kits. I just bought one and want to review it for you. I’ll have to get to the review part later as I am helping a friend out today. But here is a sneak of what I have done with the kit (and a couple extras).

Recipe:

Scrapbook Chicks kit: Buttons, flours, butterfly rhinestone, alpha stickers, Journal Card & Pattern Paper (October Afternoon).
Extras: Glitter spray (Clearsnap), Tree mask (Cricut), punch (Stampin’ Up)

Design Team Entry

I just got the results back from a design team I entered and I wasn’t chosen. So now I am free to share the project I made for the entry. I decided to use a card I made for my 16th Anniversary. In entering this contest I wasn’t sure whether I should stick with something similar in style to what I usually see from this company or to go with something a little different. I decided to go with something different. I went with a more elegant mellower look rather than the colorful energetic look I often see. The main reason I did this was a brief mention I heard of wanting the designers to show a different style. After seeing the winning entries I don’t think my approach was a good one! Most of the winners were right up there in the colorful energetic and cute category. I’m sure that is not the only factor for their winning. A huge part of this team I think is the activity level on the blog and facebook page for this company. And that isn’t me right now. I knew I didn’t have a big chance of winning. But I tried anyway!

Cricut Lite Meow

I’m excited about the new Cricut Lite cartridges. I like having a sampling of images rather than a large cartridge full of images that I will probably never use. The only catch is that I usually pay $25-40 on ebay for a full cartridge and the new lites retail for $39.99 at WalMart. In the end I am getting fewer cuts for the same or higher price than I am used to paying. And I have to shop at WalMart, my least favorite store. Regardless, I like several of the new releases and will buy them. I already bought Meow and would like to share my thoughts and projects on this cartridge.

I found some of the small detailed cuts, such as tiny noses, hard to work with. When I used a nice sticky mat and a lower speed and pressure the cuts came out much better. Prior to making those changes I kept shifting and tearing my paper. Even with the troubles I think the cuts are so fun that I am willing to work with any troubles. See what I made…

Recipe:
pattern papers: Scenic Route
cardstock, ribbon, chalk: Stampin’ Up
Cricut cartridges: Meow (Lite), Opposites Attract
markers: Marvey
alpha stickers: from stash

One of the reasons I loved this cartridge is that we adopted two kittens back in April. These kittens were introduced into our lives after a very bad experience of being dog owners. The cats are such a joy compared to the troubles with the dog! I never thought I would be a scrapper of fur babies but these sweeties have converted me to a sappy pet-scrapper. The title was cut with the purr+cat image from the Meow cartridge then I used the Opposites Attract cartridge to finish the letter for the title. The paw prints and the two kittens also came from Meow.

Recipe:
pattern papers: Scenic Route, Bella Blvd., Piggy Tales
cardstock: Stampin’ Up, Bazill
punch: Fiskars
Cricut Cartridge: Meow (lite)

And the images on this cartridges are just so fun that I had to make a card. Don’t know how I’ll use this card yet, but I love, love, love it!

And if those were enough reasons to buy this cartridge, my girls love to play with the cricut with me. It is good time crafting together. My 8 year old made this project. It is a layout with pockets on it to hold her family of cats. Each family comes in each of the 4 colors. Cut the cats & embellish with markers. How fun!

Father’s Day

Whew, it has been a very busy May and June here. I haven’t been able to get as many posts in as I wanted. I am lining up some new posts for the coming weeks. I will have some book reviews and some product reviews as well as a few layouts for you.

This past weekend we were camping with 5 other families in the woods. It rained and was cold and muddy, but we had a great time anyway! Since I knew we would be camping on Father’s Day I prepared some goody boxes for all the Dads to enjoy. These boxes were really quick and fun to put together — and my girls helped me out. You can adapt these boxes to any event. Use a different stamp saying, cut an appropriate image, like a cupcake, some balloons, or a graduation cap, fill with treats and make someone smile.

Recipe:

Pattern papers: Scenic Route
Cardstock, stamp, ink: Stampin’ Up
Cricut cartridge: Tags Bags, Boxes & More*; A Child’s Year**

*The box and the black background shape are from TBBM. The orange foreground is the same cut as the black background. I simply stamped my greeting, trimmed away the excess cardstock and adhered it to the project to line up with the edges of the background.

** The father holding the baby is actually an image from A Child’s Year of a mother holding a baby. I simply trimmed off the mother’s long hair and it substituted for a father just fine!

LOAD Day 24 to 26

I’ve got a very busy weekend ahead of me. Our family is going to our annual unschooling conference. It is an exhilarating and exhausting 5 days! I thought I would post the last few days LOAD project before all the activity gets under way for us tomorrow.

Day 24: Our homeschool science fair. This was the first one and we hope to make it an annual event.

Day 25: A camping trip from last fall. I made my own photo collage template and fit 34 photos on my layout!

Day 26: I’ve had these duck stickers for a long time and finally had a chance to use them. I used the cricut with center point function turned on to cut circles out of my photos and matted with circles 1/4″ larger. I paired some more elegant paper with the cuter duck stickers. I think the balanced worked well.

Final NSD & LOAD Day 3

Okay, so I finished up my challenges for NSD today finally! And I worked on my LOAD layout for the day. Check them all out.

This was a NSD challenge to create a shaped object. It is a card I made for my SIL for Mother’s Day. I really had fun with this one. Making a card in the shape of a letter? It was great. Try it using the recipients initial.

The NSD challenge here was to create something with or for a child. Since my 3yo scraps with me all the time, this was a breeze. I mentioned the word Cricut and she came running. She decided she wanted to make a princess and viola.

Final NSD challenge was to create a monochromatic plus flower project. A Mother’s Day card for my MIL in her favorite color.

And my LOAD project for today…

Recipe:

pattern paper, rubons, stickers: Piggy Tales
cardstock: Stampin’ Up
punch: Fiskars
monogram letter: Circut (Opposites Attract)
brads: from stash
font: Times New Roman

NSD recap

So I had a great time celebrating NSD with a couple of friends. We chatted, listened to music, snacked and learned things from each other. It was a good day. I’m looking forward to working on more projects here in a few minutes. Today I am going to focus on challenges put out by blogs and community sites that I follow. I am also going to work on my layout for LOAD. More about that next post. For now here are the things I completed for NSD.

This one you saw as my last challenge post yesterday. While I completed all the other NSD challenges before hand. This one I did day of. It was also my Day 1 entry for LOAD.

A no photo layout using saved items.

And Pages from the class I am taking at Big Picture Scrapbooking called Everyday Adventures. I posted about this class in an earlier post as well. The first layout was to create a page about things you buy, the second page was to explore type and the final was to think about the things you throw away. My daughter played along with that one and her interpretation is on the right of the photo.

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…

Scrapping a secret

So I recently scrapped a secret. It was interesting to make a page and not give away what was happening! The story is this… My friend has become a cat/kitten foster parent. She got her first batch of kittens several weeks ago. We had a chance to go and visit the mama with her little babies. My daughter has been wanting a cat for a while now, but due to some problems we’ve had with pets in the past we weren’t sure we were ready. But my husband and I were talking about the kittens and were coming to the conclusion that we could adopt them and try the pet thing again. So as my daughter was cuddling these little cuties it was in the back of my mind that they may be coming home with us. We didn’t tell our kids any such thing because we didn’t want to get their hopes up in case we changed our minds. As I was making this layout we still had not decided whether or not we would take them. All my journaling had to play around what I was really thinking and feeling in order to keep this secret.

Have you ever scrapped a secret or surprise? You should give it a try, it is an interesting experience.

Supplies:Pattern paper, alpha stickers, rubons (Piggy Tales); vellum, inks, punches (Stampin’ Up); stamp (Technique Tuesday); die cutter (Cricut with Storybook cartridge)