Paper strip cake and rolled candles

Just another quick post! Some birthday cards making a cake out of the strips of paper, and then rolling paper scraps around a pencil to make little candles...and of course using a glue pen to make glitter candle flames :)

Empty Nest

Just a quick post to share a card I made for a friend and co-worker. Her son moved away for school and it was a hard transition! I got the Create-A-Critter cartridge, and decided to try the owl :) the berries on the tree branch are little red rhinestones, and I just drew the dotted lines. Simple, but adorable!

Smurf Party

My little neice and nephew are having a Smurf-themed birthday! We thought finding party supplies would be easy because that movie came out recently, but I guess that hype fizzled out fast. There were a few things at party city, but they weren't even that cute....Soooo naturally, I had a billion and one ideas, not to mention spent many nights wishing that they would come out with a Cricut Smurf cartridge. Next best thing was the Gnomes and Mushroom cart! Its a cheapo one, because there are only a few things on it, but for this party it was a jackpot! Even a mushroom house! So we made mushroom house invitations :) I cute the mushroom pieces from cardstock, and then my sister in law printed and cut the party information and stuck it on the back.

My biggest project thus far has been the banners. I already had the red and blue and white cardstock in my supplies, and I had seen an adorable project on pinterest where someone had used pages from a worn out children's book to make a banner. Wellllllll these weren't exactly worn out books, but they were little inexpensive paperbacks! As a book lover who felt shameful using her kindle for about a year, I felt even worse buying books for the purpose of cutting them up!! I felt like I was going to burst into flames at the Barnes and Noble counter. I used the Ribbons and Rosettes cartridge to make little rosettes, and put smurfs in the middle. I used my teeny tiny scissors to cut out smurf figures from the parts of the pages that didn't get turned into the banner. I cute some mushrooms as well. I think the banner is going to be hung from the eaves on the patio for the party, so I wanted it to be double-sided. The rosettes are stuck onto the banner string by a two little jewels and some hot glue. If this had just been a girl party, you can bet there would have been way more glitter and gems...just sayin'....

It also turns out that since I have the cricut expression, and I am lazy about updating firmware, I just slid under the cut-off for using Sure-Cuts-A-Lot. I am definitely a newbie, and much more comfortable with Craft Room software at the moment, but I was able to put together a large smurf from an SVG file, so the kiddos can do "Pin the hat on the Smurf!"

I am planning on making table decorations with little terra cotta pots, and perhaps a blue and white trifle as an extra dessert! Will do a second post if those work out.

*****UPDATE******
The party was awesome, and the decorations came out great (was still making them up to the very last second, of course) Here are some of the final products in action...and my blue trifle at the end lol

Baby Shower Card -pop out crib

This post is about my go-to baby shower card :) I have seen pictures of similar ideas before, but at the moment I don't have any saved, and I haven't copied these designs from anyone. The crib was made with the cricut, from the "Baby Steps" cartridge. I used Cricut Craft Room to weld together 4 sides (shortening two of them) into a long strip. I put little tiny rectangles in between each piece to give a little space to fold. I will upload the CCR file (anyone else think of the band every time they see that written out? No? Just me?).

So the crib pulls off the mat in one long strip, and then you fold them into a rectangle and glue the last edge together. If you have the big thingie that has nice lines and the little tool for folding, definitely use that. If you have a wal-mart folding table as your craft table like I do, you can use the crease in the table and a plastic paintbrush rounded end to make score lines ;) Not wooden, unless it is unpainted, or the color will come off on your crib. So that is it for the crib!

The rest is pretty much up to you...the mobile I make by just cutting strips of paper. I poke holes in them with a sewing machine needle and string some thread through. Whatever is hanging off the mobile is either cut with a small punch, or cut with the cricut. I glue the ends of the thread between two pieces so that there is a back and a from for each object hanging in the mobile. The shelves, the wallpaper, etc. is whatever fits the theme! If the couple is registered, I usually look at what decorating themes or colors they have gone with and make it match!

Don't get discouraged if this takes a while on the first try. It took me forever to get it right the first time, but after getting the process down, I can crank one of these out pretty quickly. Since I don't have any good pictures of the actual process, please ask me if any of this is unclear! These are a huge hit, especially when they are personalized for the theme.

Witchy Shoes

This would have been a great post about 3 weeks ago...But better late then never! Getting a jump start for next year, I guess...This was a rare case where I actually took some pictures during the process of a project, and not just the final product (although I think I took about a thousand pics of the final shoes). These were inspired by some incredible altered shoes I saw via Pinterest, from this amazing blog. The process of adding the curled toe was completely copied from her method. Check out her beautiful work!! Anyways, the shoes were plain black low heel (the plan was to wear them to work for the kiddos!) Payless shoes that cost 15 dollars. Those of you who have normal sized feet can probably find even cheaper ones at cheaper stores :) those of us who have feet like the Jolly Green Giant have to take what we can get. The toe was shaped with a blob of tin foil (nice precise measurement, no?) and covered with masking tape. The masking tape continued onto the shoe to attempt to make it blend a little better. Then I tried to fill in the nooks and crannies a little by coating it with gel medium. This is definitely optional, and there are certainly other things like gesso that would be good to use. I happened to have the gel medium on hand. This is what it looked like at that point:




Obviously it isn't very smooth or perfectly formed...I was planning to cover it with paint and glitter, and I was hoping the glitter would sort of fill in the bumps a little more. So next I painted the tip and the sides with plain old acrylic craft paint.

From there, the fun really begins! The tricky part was adding the embossed spiderwebs on the side. They are heat embossed, with opaque white embossing powder. It is a little fussy, because you can't really get a good flat surface to press the stamp into. But that ended up being important, because my fiancee commented that without the spiderweb, it would have looked like a mardi gras shoe lol. I glittered the tip with matching bright green glitter, and I added rhinestones with the trusty E600 glue. The big buckle things on the toes were on clearance at Jo-Ann for 1.50 each, and they were stuck on with hot glue. And of course, some cheapo feathers everywhere!

 

The last touch was my halloween tutu :) Needless to say, it was a big hit with both the kiddos and teachers at work!