Forever Rudolph

This week, the free cartridge for the Cricut Craftroom is the 3D Rudolph Head and I just had to try it out! I adapted the plaque background to fit into the sketch design. It was tricky, but fun.

I stamped the Studio G sentiment ("naughty or nice") in brown StazOn ink onto wood tape and added a staple. I used Vintage Photo distress ink for the distressing on the wood-grain paper as well as to color more wood tape. The silver doily was a gift from Mom, as were the little jingle bells.

Inspiration/Challenges:
Connie Can Crop #40: Cornycopia (2nd entry)
Decorate to Celebrate: Anything 3D
Mojo Monday: Sketch #422
Unicorn Challenge: Christmas is Coming

Update: This was selected as a prize winner for Mojo Monday #422!

Thank you for visiting & inspiring my crafting!

Rare Oddities

My mom gifted me with some sheets of Graphic45's funky & lovely "Rare Oddities" collection, and I've been planning on making a gatefold card with it. I was finally inspired to do so by this week's free Cricut Craftroom cartridge, Chemistry Icons, and ended up adding a shaker to the card.

If you're familiar with this paper collection, you'll notice the little elements I paper-pieced and the color I added to the front text with gel pens. I also added some Candi to the corners.

Here's the card closed:

...right side opened:

...and fully open. I used gold & teal microbeads to fill the shaker portion behind the chemistry set.

Inspiration/Challenges:
Artistic Inspirations: Anything Goes with Twist of Magic
Come and Get It: More than 1 Fold
Crafty Hazelnut's Patterned Paper September Challenge: Anything Goes with Patterned Paper (2nd entry)


Thank you for visiting & for inspiring my crafting,

Banana Pie

I've starting using my Cricut Craftroom more, and couldn't resist using the Create a Critter 2 to make this silly card for my husband.

I colored the heart-patterned paper with Barely Banana SU! ink. The background & pie are a white-frosted yellow Core'Dinations cardstock. I sanded & distressed background with my Prima distressing tool. I added color to the pie and detail to the bananas with Copic markers. The burlap trim is from my stash. I sure had fun making this card, especially the tiny banana slices!

Challenges/Inspiration:
Di's Digis Designs: Monochromatic
DoubleClick Skittles: Use Food
Fantabulous Cricut Challenge: Sketch + Cricut cut
Simon Says Stamp: Food and/or Drink
Stemplegarten #40: Hmmm...Yummy

Thank you for visiting & for inspiring my crafting,

Pilin' on the Summer Camp

The theme this week at Pile It On is Cultural/Family Traditions. Check out my other cards for this challenge here & here.

This time, I focused on a tradition I grew up with, which is roasting marshmallows over a campfire. It was a fun childhood experience: we'd go out and find proper marshmallow-roasting sticks, and then sit around a freshly-made fire & try not to burn our mouths too badly on the resulting S'mores. Personally, I liked to catch mine on fire...you get a show and a marshmallow crust! To create this scene, I used the Cricut's Campin' Critters Cartridge with Cricut Craftroom & my Cricut Expression.

I couldn't get the sentiment to cut correctly, so I used a Cricut marker instead. I then cut the shape around it, backed it with a black shadow layer, and filled in the letters with a black gel pen. Isn't this hedgehog(?) too cute‽ I even used the funky eyes that come with the design, adding pupils with a black pen. I covered the marshmallow piece with a Marvy Snow Pen, which gave it a fun texture.

I used a Tim Holtz embossing folder to add the trees to the background. I inked the raised trees with a Copic marker. I distressed all the mattes with a nail file. I think you can guess why I chose the colors I did! I hope this will inspire you to share a custom or tradition with us at Pile It On!

Challenges/Inspiration:

Bitten by the Bug: Food + Cricut Cut
Fantabulous Cricut Challenge: Anything Cricut Goes

Thank you for visiting & inspiring my crafting! Hope you'll join us at Pile It On,

Ice Cream Time with My Sheri & Jellypark ... and MORE!

I've been so lucky these past few weeks to have won some prizes with my challenge cards. For example, I won this fabulous Ice Cream Truck digi from Jellypark via Fetch-a-Sketch Challenge 25:

This was so much fun to color! My husband surprised me on Saturday with a mini shopping spree at Michaels! ... Happily, they had restocked their Copics so we chose some fun new colors, including W1, my first from their "Warm Gray" series. Wow, it's awesome! Later in the day, he went over to his buddy's house to play Civilization (a computer game) and I stayed home and made this card. While I was coloring the image, I sent him a few photos of its progress; I am so glad he married me ha ha!

I cut the ice cream cone out with the Doodlecharms Cricut cartridge, added some shading with Copics, and sprayed it with Iridescent Gold glimmer mist from Tattered Angels.

The Sentiment is from the Sweet Treat stamp collection by Beth Gunnell for Quick Cards Made Easy. The daisy background is from Outlines Rubber Stamps, and I heat-embossed it in Kaleidoscope. The "snowball" wired ribbon is from Michaels; I used Copics to make them little balls of ice cream!

You might be wondering why I chose green for my main ice cream color; well, it's because it represent 3 of my most favorite flavors: Mint, Pistachio, and Daiquiri Ice!

Simon Says Stamp

Inspiration/Challenges:

Great Impressions: "Show us your best stay in the lines coloring"
The Hybrid Chick Card Caravan: Ice Cream

My Sheri Crafts Challenge #90: Nat'l Ice Cream Month

Pause, Dream, Enjoy Challenge #29: Your Favorite Summer Treat

Simon Says Stamp: Dawny's Sketch (right)
*Tuesday Alchemy Challenge #25: Ice Cream Social (Corrine from their DT invited me to link up here as well...thanks Corrinne!)

Update: This card won an Ooo-La-La Award for My Sheri Crafts Challenge #90!

Thank you for visiting,

So You Think You Can Cut?

A few years ago, my mom really got into scrapbooking and cardmaking, and started giving me extras of things she bought. At the time, I was focusing on learning electronic design (web and book design, on a small level; I'm no graphic designer), and I honestly wasn't sure what to do with all the brads and paper and ideas. One thing I found out quickly was that nothing is as relaxing for a person working in creativity than being creative in a different way. After a day of staring at a computer screen and worrying about code and "true colors" and leading and tracking and what-not, there was something almost spiritual about cutting out paper and immersing oneself in glue.

This last Christmas, Mom gave me a Cricut Personal Cutting machine that uses a cartridge with digital "dies". I was a little unsure how I would feel about having to design within the parameters of pre-designed images, but once I cut out a perfect letter, I was hooked. And having pre-designed images always sort of reminded me of the freedom of writing in form: you sometimes find more creative freedom within strict parameters.

And then I discovered Sure Cuts A Lot (SCAL, or, as J calls it, "So You Think You Can Cut") and my life changed.

SCAL is a program that allows you to design your own images on your computer and then use your Cricut as a sort of USB printer. Provocraft, the makers of Cricut, offer their own program, but they showed no real interest in developing a Mac version and so I went the free-spirited, hackerish route of SCAL. Sorry Cricut, but I already gave my loyalty (and all my money) to Apple.

The SCAL platform is truly fantastic, mimicking the familiar Adobe-type design platform. It's a lot like working in Illustrator, especially for vector manipulation. You can use special .svg files, or just import an image and SCAL will break it into cut lines. Once you have the image in SCAL, you can manipulate it any way you want.

Oh, and did I mention that you can use any font? The possibilities are endless.

My cousin has the Silhouette personal electronic cutter, which never needs cartridges and uses its own design program. There's also a program called Make the Cut, but, again, SCAL is the most Mac-friendly.


In any case, I'm not an illustrator, so even with super-SCAL I needed some images to start from. Have you heard of this amazing resource called the "Inter-Net"? It's really something else. I just googled "svg scal" and found a gillion folks who generously share their cut files. I learned so, so much from those free files.

Here's an example of a card I made using files from SCALe-files, hands-down the top site for intricate, free cut files. I added the Chinese letters for "Summer Solstice." Here's the file if you want to make your own: http://www.4shared.com/file/yp2RmqA-/chineselamp_scale_cgsays.html

As I mentioned earlier in this post, you can also import images to use as cut files. I found that coloring books are an easy resource for line-based images. I worry a lot about Creative Rights and try my best not to use others' work as my own. Here's a fun example of what I did with a Doberman and a kitten (all I did was import the images from a Google Image search, separate the layers, and click "cut"):

To be honest, the kitten was much more difficult than I had anticipated. The Dobermans were a dream: talk about a scrapbook-friendly dog! But I figured that I'd be able to easily find a SCAL-ready .svg of a kitten, free or not. Maybe I just didn't look in the right places, but I ended up using another color-book image and re-doing the eyes so that they cut correctly. Since early summer is kind of kitten season, here's the free SCAL file.
http://www.4shared.com/file/oZkxtffq/kittenhead_cgsays.html

My favorite part of this card-making business is that it seems to be one of those universal languages, like cooking. On Mondays I send out a few cards to random acquaintances, and somehow I feel like I can accomplish whatever the week brings. And now I've found myself part of a real-life design team over at Too Many Ideas (thank you, Therese!) Every Monday for 3 months the team will present our takes on Therese's designs (PaperFacesDesigns).

Now to get back to cutting...