Happy Birthday Matey!

This pirate-themed birthday card isn't too "young" for a 30-year-old husband and father of a friend of mine, right!? Even if it is, at least his wife, my friend, is also a scrapbooker and is used to seeing these homemade cards :)

So at first I was going to use my new Buccaneer cartridge I got for my Cricut Imagine, but realized I am basically running out of black ink! The blue surrounding the "Happy Birthday Matey" greeting is supposed to be black...

So I had to nix the pirate monkey, and used the Life's a Party cartridge to cut out a treasure chest the old school way - layering multiple pieces of colored paper! Oh well, it still came out nice and fun!


HOW-TO:

• Cut the "Happy Birthday Matey!" at 4" on the Cricut Imagine Buccaneer cartridge (I had it print and cut in layers so I could popup the "Birthday" portion)
• After I realized that blue was supposed to be black, I decided to outline the letters with a thin black pen to make them stand out a little more
• Using Bazzill paper, I cut the treasure chest, each piece at 2.7" relative size, from the "Life's a Party" Cricut cartridge
• The piece of background paper is from the Nantucket collection by Pink Paislee

Thank You Card - Paper Flower

This is a special thank you card for an elderly couple I've never met! They know my Mom from the library where she works, and sent us a very beautiful silver tray as a wedding present for me and my husband! I definitely wanted to make a special card for them.

I won't lie though and tell you this was easy to do, especially because at the time of making this card, I only had this picture to look at and couldn't find the instructions on how it was done! I studied it as closely as I could and saw it was probably 8 circles folded and placed together to form one big circle...

After many practice attempts and finally agreeing with myself on a practical method, I started cutting and folding... it was only AFTER I finished the whole thing that I found this blog entry to teach a much easier way to fold the pieces! Oh well!

HOW-TO (The HARD, fastidious way that I taught myself):

• Cut 8 circles approximately 2" in diameter
• Fold once in half, fold from there in half to have 4 quarters... unfold, then fold in half, and fold the sides down along the crease in the middle - unfold and you should have 8 "pie pieces"
• This is where it got tricky... I used my scoring blade in my trimmer to score 2 lines - for each line, start at the same "bottom" end of a crease, and go up/outwards at a 45 degree angle, to form a "V"
• Fold in along one side of the V, then fold part of that flap back aligned at the middle... then repeat on the other side
• Repeat with each circle
• Cut one 2 or 4" circle and fold similarly till you get 8 pie pieces
• Put double sided adhesive on one side of the circle, then stick each folded circle into each pie piece
• Add button and voila!

HOW-TO (The EASY way that I didn't see until I finished the hard way):

• Or you could just do it this way!

Side note: The materials I used were "Countryside" paper from the Farmhouse collection by Crate Paper. The button was from the matching farmhouse collection flea market buttons. The background paper was from the Amy Tangerine collection by American Crafts and the letter stickers are Teeny Alpha teal wood grain by Glitz.

A Christmas Card

I do not make lots of cards to send out at Christmas... not yet anyway. Maybe someday I'll get my act together enough to do this, but until then, my friend Kara was the lucky recipient of this year's only Christmas card I made (so far but probably at all)!

I got the idea and steps for making the tree from this blog entry from BasicGrey. It was more difficult than it looked, but once I realized these 2 things (after a few practice tries on plain paper that are in the garbage now):

1.) How to actually fold the half circle (the folds do not have to come from the top... if that makes sense)
2.) You have to start with a pretty big circle pattern to begin with to get a decent sized tree

HOW-TO:

• I used "Fly a Kite 'Wish' Ribbon" paper by My Mind's Eye and cut out a circle using the "inner" circle in the big circle pattern template from Creative Memories, cutting out a circle with approximately an 8.75" diameter (This made the tree the perfect size for a 5x7" card).
• Cut the circle in half (I folded it as best I could, then trimmed along the fold)
• From here, I recommend folding on a practice sheet, then when I finally got it just right, I used it to know where to fold the real half circle I was going to use by placing the practice over the real one and folding as close to the same folds as I could
• I usually can't stand scrapping in such an inexact way, but knew I could cover the imperfections at the top with a star
• The star is from the Holiday Style Flower Sack by October Afternoon
• The background paper is "All the Trimmings" paper from the 12 days of Christmas collection by My Mind's Eye that came in the latest Studio Calico Brooklyn Flea kit
• The Christmas sentiment is a rub on from KaiserCraft that I randomly found in my stash as I was picking out the background paper!