Back at it – New Sketch Sunday!

Welcome back! Well, that was more for me than you all. I have been missing for awhile, I know. Things have been crazy here. I moved, lost a job, got a new job and have already decided that the craft room that I set up about a year ago doesn’t work for me. I am in the process of redoing the craft room, so that will keep me busy for awhile.

Anyway, I started up the Sketch Sunday series again yesterday. I made my first card based off of the sketch from My Favorite Things. The link will be listed at the end of the post. You have until 12:00 Noon EST to enter their contest. But don’t worry – there’s a new one every week!

When I was redoing my craft room, I found a bunch of supplies that I thought I had lost! One of those things was my heat gun. So, of course, I had to use it on this card.

 

Here is the link to the video I made if you want to see how I created it.

The supplies I used are:

Martha Stewart Heat Gun

Martha Stewart Ebony Embossing Powder

Versamark Ink

Distress Inks in Spun Sugar, Picked Raspberry and Worn Lipstick

Mini Ink Blending Tools

Copics: E000, E00, E11,E15, E18 (all ciao) R14, R17 (both Sketch)

#coloring Markers (from Michael’s) : R3, R17, B2

Nicole Premiere Marker (from AC Moore): Slate

Promarker:Ice Grey 1

My Favorite Things RazzleBerry Ink (sentiment and wallpaper background) and Hybrid Black Licorice (main image and stamping for mask)

My Favorite Things Background Stamps: Fleur de Lis and Roses All Over

My Favorite Things Stamp and Dies: Time for the Bubbly

White card stock: Michael’s Multipack

MISTI Stamping Tool (regular size)

Fiskar’s scissors

V5 Pilot Pen in Black

Thanks for stopping by! Here is where you can find me :

IG – scrapsecrets1120

YouTube – chelebelle1120

Using the new Disney cartridges

I made a Mickey head the other day from the Mickey and Friends cartridge. Of course I can’t find it now to take a picture. One of my new followers was asking about the Disney cartridges I got recently after she watched one of my videos. She wanted to know how difficult it was to make some cuts from the cartridges.

I watched other people’s videos and learned some tips and tricks. I leaned that if you used the slowest speed, the cuts come out better. Also, make the cuts the biggest size possible. I made a video of all the tips and tricks and posted it on YouTube. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=cQQkbsDAgPw&feature=plcp if you want to check it out!

Tonight, I decided to tackle the Disney Classics cartridge. I broke one of my own rules and made the cuts at 4 inches. I should’ve made the cuts bigger because a lot of them didn’t cut out properly. I made adjustments, however, and made due with what I had and salvaged as much of the cuts as possible. (Having a white and a black gel pen doesn’t hurt either!)

Im not overly thrilled with the way Alice turned out. You can recognize that it is her and I’m sure that most people wouldn’t notice the things I did notice. I did have fun making Alice in Wonderland though and I can’t wait to make the other characters on the cartridge.

Yesterday, I made two characters from the Mickey and Friends cartridge. I made a Minnie Mouse and a Donald Duck. When I was at AC Moore a couple of days ago, I bought a bunch of the $1 bin stamps. One of them said “Oh Heck! I missed your birthday”. I made the Donald cut of him jumping up and down, where he looks like he’s mad.  I thought that it would be perfect for that sentiment.

The Minnie Mouse cut I used was the one of her jumping in the air. I used one of the My Pink Stamper stamp sets that has the stamp “Kick up your heels”.  The interior of the card is blank so it can be a thinking of you or a get well card. I am really happy with the way those two cards came out.

The last card that I made was one using a new stamp I got from AC Moore and a new paper pack I got from Joann’s. I also used a Fiskar’s edge punch that I never used before that I thought mimicked the bubbles in the “Hello Friend” stamp I used. It was from another stamp set that I got from the $1 bin. I used VersaMark and some Stampendous white embossing powder on the sentiment.

Here are some pictures of the four cards. I am off to make some more cuts from those (and my other) new Cricut cartridges! Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to leave a comment or question and subscribe.

Michele

Playing catch up!

I feel like lately I have been playing catch up. My day job has been crazy, so I haven’t had as much time to work on projects as I would like. I had an amazing client ask for a custom order at the craft fair that took me awhile to work on. I loved the idea that she proposed so much that I actually did the same thing for my brother and sister-in-law for part of their wedding present!

For the custom order, I was asked to make one wedding card and eight Christmas cards from the couple. She wanted teal, white and silver as the colors incorporated into both cards. For the wedding one, she wanted starfish and sand dollars along with the colors. It took me awhile to come up with the concept for the wedding card – the Christmas one was easy!

For the eight Christmas cards, I took a white card base and cut a black sheet of card stock to fit over the front, with a small border of the white showing around the edges. I then used a snowflake background stamp inked up with VersaMark and silver embossing powder to create the front piece of the card. Using the Cricut cartridge Elegant Edges, I chose one of the circles with a scalloped edge and cut the top layer in white and the bottom layer in teal. Then I took a monogram stamp that I got from the AC Moore dollar bin and inked it up with teal Stazon ink and placed the “k” monogram in the center. I had some teal see-through ribbon that I thought would look great behind the monogram. I glued all the layers together and then onto the front of the card base.

For the interior, the customer wanted it to say “Merry Christmas from Mr and Mrs. (last name)”. Since I don’t really like printing sentiments from the computer, I had to find stamps that had the correct saying and were size appropriate. The first one I chose was a sled and two reindeer that said Merry Christmas underneath it. Then from a word stamp set that I got at Hobby Lobby I took the word “from”. The Mr and Mrs also came from a stamp I picked up at Hobby Lobby, but this one was a wood mounted stamp. (The other one was a clear stamp.) The last stamp I chose was a sign stamp where I could print their last name.

I inked up all these stamps with the same teal Stazon ink I used on the front and stamped them onto a piece of white card stock. I backed that with a piece of black card stock that was a little larger and then placed them onto the inside of the card.

The wedding card was another story. It took me so long to come up with a concept I wasn’t sure I would get it done in time! I knew that I had sand dollars and starfish on the Life’s a Beach Cricut cartridge. I also bought a stamp set when my sister got married on the beach that featured beachy items. I just couldn’t get a background image together.

I went through all my paper (which is A LOT!!) and came across this beach scene – sand, palm trees, beautiful blue sky with clods and the water. I knew I had a stamp of a couple dancing, so it was coming together. What if they were dancing on the beach with some sand dollars and starfish around them, with the beautiful sky and ocean in the background? I cut the paper so that it was mostly the beach and then adhered it to the front of the white card base, with no border. Then, I cut out the pieces from the Cricut and I believe they were 3/4″ or 1″ at the most from white card stock. I inked them up with tea dye distress ink so that they wouldn’t stand out on the beach as much.

Next,  used the same teal Stazon ink and stamped the image of the couple dancing onto white card stock. I did some fussy cutting and then attached it to some silver paper. I also stamped “Best Wishes” onto a piece of white card stock with silver ink and then attached it to some silver paper as well. I adhered the sand dollars, starfish and sentiment right to the card base, but for the couple, I used pop dots so that they would stand out.

For the inside, I used some teal paper and a Martha Stewart deep edge border punch with hearts. The teal paper covered the interior of the card and then I placed a piece of white card stock right underneath of it. On that, I used a stamp that said “May your new lives together abound in love today, tomorrow and forever”. I used some of the hearts that were left over from the top cut out to adorn the corners of the white paper and I was done!

Here are some pictures of the custom order!

        

Thanks for stopping by! As always, feel free to leave comments or questions.

 

Embossing on shiny paper

Today I was working on one of my 8×8 baby scrapbooks and I was looking for a certain color of paper to emboss a sentiment on. The only paper that I could find that would go with the background paper happened to be a shiny, metallic paper. I had never tried to emboss on that before because I just assumed that it wouldn’t work. I had tried to stamp on shiny paper and unless you use an ink like Stazon, it takes a long time to dry and smudges.

Because of my stamping experience with shiny paper, I stayed away from embossing on it. I had to try three different times before I got something I liked. The first time, I used green glitter Martha Stewart embossing powder. The result wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for. Between the shininess of the paper and the glitter in the powder, it was too much. So, the second try was a white embossing powder by Martha Stewart. When I hit it with the heat gun, I realized that it was an opaque powder and not the regular white. I accidentally grabbed the wrong one! Ahhhh! Oh well. It came out good, but not great. The opaqueness made it too difficult to see the words once it was placed behind the page protector. On to the third try.

This time I used a Merlot colored Recollections embossing powder. When it was in the bottle, the color was almost the exact same as one of the colors in the background. But, once the heat gun hit it, it was a little different. I’m not sure if it was because of the shiny background or the darker color. It was still my best option and I was tired of trying : )

I used my fancy edged scissors to cut out the phrase and then I placed it on the page with the other items to see how I wanted it to look. It was a long phrase, so I placed it on pop dots so that you could still slide a picture underneath it. Here are some pictures of it:

Thanks for stopping by!

Explosion box

A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon a video on how to make an explosion box. Since it was a step by step video, I used that to help me make my first one. I didn’t go crazy decorating it, but I still think it turned out cute.

When we were trying to come up with an idea for my sister and her fiancé’s wedding gift, we decided to get them a gift certificate to the hotel that they were staying at. This way, they could use it for dinner, drinks, the room, sightseeing or whatever else they wanted. If you know me (or have read some of my other posts), I couldn’t just give them a gift card or a card saying that the gift card is waiting for them in Hawaii.

So, I decided to make them an explosion box! I thought that I could decorate part of it with wedding related icons and the other part with Hawaii related items. I started off with the outer most layer. I knew I wanted this to be the wedding part, since it was for their wedding! I created the bride from the Everyday Paper Doll cartridge. When I tried to cut the flowers out for the bride, the paper kept ripping since it had to be cut so small. Instead, I cut them out in blackout and then ran them through my Cuttlebug Swiss Dots folder. This gave the effect of the center of the flower and then I was able to just draw the outline of the flowers around them. I used Frosted Lace Stickles around her veil to give it some shine. 

I used the same cartridge for the groom, but since this was a beach wedding he wasn’t going to wear a tux. I chose the prom boy suit and then made it tan. I added some white gel pen stripes to the tie to help it stand out from the suit. 

The next side I did was the Mr and Mrs and rings side. I cut these pieces from my Sweethearts cartridge. When the rings were cut out, you couldn’t really see the lines in the diamond, so I went over them with my teal pen. Then I decided to use my silver stickles to go over the bands and then my Diamond stickles to go over the diamond. I used one of my blue stickles to go over the words Mr and Mrs. 

For the last side of the outside of the box, I chose a sticker that I already had of a wedding cake. It looked a little plain to me so I added Cotton Candy stickles over the flowers to give it some color and some white stickles to the frosting on the layers to give it some more dimension. After that was done, I had the four outside panels of my box done. 

The next step was to create pockets on the backs of the outermost layer. I did this by taking patterned paper and cutting them down to the same size as the layer and then taking my scallop punch and punching out a little lip in each pocket top. I decided to use wedding words and icon stamps I had in my collection to go on the inserts. I stamped the images in VersaMark and then heat embossed them with white powder. 

The other layers of the explosion box were created in the same manor. I used cartridges Pack Your Bags and Life is a Beach for the majority of these images. I also used a couple of the embossing folders I had that said love and together forever. I used some clothes pins that I picked up on clearance at Michaels. Stickles were used to enhance some of the words or images. I tried to use a variety of techniques when I designed the explosion box. Here are the results:

For the last layer’s pockets, I found a quote that I was able to divide up into four parts. I used the clothes pins to number each paper and then added an envelope to the bottom of the inside layer. In that envelope was a message to the bride and groom explaining that their present from all 8 of their siblings was waiting for them in Hawaii.

Here is what the final product looked liked on the night the siblings gave the present to the bride and groom. Unfortunately, the lid didn’t fare so well in its travels. (It had to be put in a carry on all the way to Mexico – I’m surprised it made it at all!! )

As always, feel free to leave questions or comments. Thanks for stopping by!

Birthdays!

April is going to be a crazy month! Between birthdays and communions, starting work full-time again (mixed feelings on that one!),two trips (one work related, one for fun) AND Easter, I think that there’s something I have to do every single day. I wrote a list of the projects I needed to work on and the first ones I tackled were the birthday cards.

I started off with my godson’s card. Since he is a twin, I thought it would be easiest to make two of the same card. That way I could cross two people’s names off my list! I don’t like doing that because the boys are different and have different separate interests. But, for the sake of time, I did it this way.

I went though all of the stamps that were birthday related (much easier now since I reorganized my stamps!) and came across a set with three different presents. I decided I wanted to emboss the background with the presents and I chose a Martha Stewart glittery blue embossing powder. If you use the glitter embossing powders, it is harder to tell when the powder is melted. Unfortunately, I had that trouble with the background of these cards because of that.

After I embossed the card, I chose another stamp that has an owl with Happy Birthday on it. I used broken china distress ink on a scrap piece of paper to change the color of the paper and then stamped the owl image twice onto it. Then I took the postage stamp border from EK Success and punched around the edges of the stamped image. I also used a lighter piece of blue paper that I ran through the Cuttlebug with the Allegro folder (I think that’s what it is called – it’s the one with all the music notes) and then put a pop dot on the back of the owl image and attached those pieces to the card.

For the inside I used red Chalkbox ink to ink up a Happy Birthday stamp. I used another shade of blue paper to cover the inside (I made a mistake on one of the cards so I needed something to cover it up) and stamped the Happy Birthday in red. Under that I wrote each boy’s name on their own card and then signed it.

The last step was to put a design on the envelope. I chose a longer stamp that has cupcakes across it. I used Black Momento ink to ink up the stamp and then stamped the image on the outside flap of the envelope. I then wrote the boys’ names on their envelope and that’s it!

The card’s design is relatively simple and it didn’t take me a long time to make them both. The most time consuming part was the embossing. There are some mistakes on the cards, but I am sure that two 8 year old boys aren’t going to notice!

Here is how they turned out:

Busy Bee! Reorganizing and Easter Card

I haven’t had time to post a lot of projects lately because it’s been crazy over here! I’ve been calling it wedding sweatshop lol. Some of the things I can’t post until after the wedding (I don’t want to give away any of the surprises for my sister’s guests who might read my blog!) and other things won’t be posted until much later. In between all of the wedding related items, I did have some time to work on an Easter card and to (re)organize my stamp collection.

I’ll start with the stamp collection. At first I was using two of the large photo/paper boxes that you can find at Michael’s or AC Moore – one to hold the wood mounted stamps and the other for clear stamps. The problem with this is that when I needed a certain stamp, I had to dig through this huge box of stamps and usually it was one that was at the bottom of the pile that I needed. (Of course – why would it be easy?) I got fed up with doing that so I decided it was time to rearrange!

I took all my stamps and divided them into categories. I have holidays, wedding, travel, animals, words/phrases/letters, girls night out (shoes, purses, and a stamp set called girls night out!), patterned, etc. This will make it easier when I am working on a holiday card or layout – I can just grab the box with all the event related stamps and am ready to go. I then placed them into the smaller photo/shoe boxes and placed them around my desk. Before I stacked the boxes two high, but inevitably I would need something from the bottom box every time! So I rearranged the desk so that the shoe boxes line it instead of being on top of each other!
For right now I have just done this with my stamps. Eventually I would like to place my stickers and embellishments of the same themes together with the stamps, but I just didn’t have the patience yesterday. (All the stickers are in two binders and already divided by categories).

After the clutter was removed from my desk, I was able to work again! I started on an Easter card and immediately came the scrapper’s block. I had a bunch of stamps that I wanted to use, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I looked at my background stamps and chose a circle pattern. I wanted to emboss it, so I stamped that with VersaMark and used Martha Stewart yellow embossing powder to create the background. I then used my Spellbinders Nestabilites die (label one), took the largest die and cut out a pink shape for part of the background. I then took the stamps and used bright and pastel colored inks to stamp the different sized eggs all over the pink paper.

Originally when I stamped the eggs, I used a light purple for one of the large eggs. It hardly showed up on the paper, so I reinked the stamp with a maroon color and was able to go right over where the first stamp had been. This is one of the major advantages to using clear stamps. Since you can see through the block and the stamp, you can usually go over your stamped image with ease if part of it didn’t get stamped or if you need to use a different color ink.

Ok – back to my project. I picked up some Happy Easter ribbon the other day and knew I wanted to use it at the bottom of the card. Once that was adhered, I placed the pink shape on the card and decided it needed some more elements. I then took a scrap piece of blue paper and inked up a basket stamp with VersaMark. For the embossing powder, I chose one of Martha Stewart’s glitter embossing powder and it shows up almost clear with a sparkle! I really liked the effect. Next I took the x-large cameo punch from Fiskars and punched out the basket to be placed on top of the pink cutout.

I wanted the pink egg paper with the blue basket to be offset, so I needed something to go on the left side of the card. After going through my Cricut cartridges, I landed on an image of a chick popping out of an egg. The egg was embossed with Swiss Dots and then placed over top of the chick and glued on to the front of the card, next to the other image. (I think this image was from Create a Critter, but I can’t be sure!)

When it came time for the sentiment, I realized that all of the Easter stamps I had were too small. I picked up a bunch from the $1 bin at AC Moore and the sets are tiny. So, I again went through my Cricut books and found the phrase A Lovely Easter to you (from the Wild Cards cartridge). The phrase was cut out from a scrap pack of paper I got on sale at AC Moore. I picked up paints when I was there a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to start adding paint to some of my projects. I bought a teal, purple and a green color and thought – maybe I should paint the words? I did and once they were dry, I adhered them to the inside of the card. The last step was to take a wooden Easter stamp I had, ink it with maroon chalk ink and stamp the image on the outside flap of the envelope.

It took me awhile to come up with all the pieces to this card, but I do think it came out cute. Here are some pictures:
Card front Card and envelope Sentiment Sentiment and envelope

Hope you enjoyed this card! Please feel free to leave any comments – thanks for stopping by!

Challenge #10 – Making your own color embossing powder

For my tenth challenge, I decided to do another technique with VersaMark. When I originally bought the VersaMark ink, I thought that you only used it for embossing. I am glad that I am finding that there are many other ways that you can use it! This layout shows one of those different techniques.

To start out, I used an image that I had cut before but wasn’t the right size. It was a large tag that says all dressed up and I had cut it out of glitter paper. The words “All Dressed Up” are cut out and when I placed it on the background, I thought it didn’t look as nice as it could. So, I took some pink scrap paper that I cut into strips. When I placed those behind the cut out words, it still didn’t look right. I found a stamp set that I haven’t really used much (Fiskars Asian Inspired cling stamps) and chose one of the flowered stamps from there. I wanted to emboss that image, but I didn’t have the correct color pink embossing powder. However, I did have worn lipstick distress ink, which would be perfect!

To make your own color, first you ink the image up with VersaMark. Then you ink the image up with the color distress ink you want. (You don’t have to use distress ink.) You then stamp the image on to your paper and cover it with clear embossing powder. Once the image is heated up, the image is embossed in the color ink you stamped with! Here is one of the background pieces that I used for the tag: and here is the final image of the tag (It looks better in person. It was hard to capture a good shot of it!)

I thought that the stripped background was a little too much for the whole page. I chose a piece of brown card stock to break it up, but it looked too plain against all the stripes. So I took another stamp from the same Fiskars set (the background stamp) and used the same technique as I did with the tag. I used the worn lipstick distress ink for this as well. It didn’t really turn out too pink, but I like the way it ended up. Next time I will try it with vintage photo or walnut stain, but I was trying to tie some of the pink in to the bottom of the page. Here are the results:

To tie the page together, I took a see through piece of pink ribbon and adhere it to the page between the two pieces of paper. Since it was sheer, I used the cheater method to attach it (Only glue or tape the ribbon on the back of the page). It was slipping a little bit on the front so I put tiny dots of glue on the edge of parts of the ribbon where it wasn’t so sheer to hold it in place. I glued down all of the pictures and the tag and my page was complete. Here’s a look at the final product:

Hope you like this page! As always, feel free to leave comments or suggestions!

Wild Card Cartridge – Cupcake

Tonight I decided to try to make another card from this cartridge. One of my friends is having a birthday this month so I thought I would make a card for her. Looking through the images available on this cartridge, I found one with a birthday cupcake and made it for her.

I started off making the envelope (see previous Wild Card Cartridge post for the reason) and it was able to be cut at 5 1/4 inches. First I cut the image out regularly (icon plus shift key) in purple and then I cut the image in blackout (icon, blackout and shift keys) in white. Doing so makes a nice liner for the card and it also helped camouflage a minor error. When I cut the first image, one of the candles did not cut out correctly.

Next I cut out the card at the same size, 5 1/4 inches, in white card stock. I then also cut out the layers of the cupcake in white card stock. For the wrapper, I applied VersaMark to the whole surface and then applied silver embossing powder. Once it is heated, the wrapper looks like the shiny tin foil wrappers for cupcakes! I then took the icing of the cupcake and ran it through the Cuttlebug to create some movement in the icing. Next, I applied VersaMark to the raised part of the image and applied shiny blue embossing powder to the icing and heated it up. Then I glued those two pieces on top of the cupcake on the card and colored the candle and flame in with marker.

To fix the error that was made cutting out the purple layer of the envelope, I cut off the flames on the purple candle. I used the same technique I did on the candle on the cupcake for the candles on the envelope. I then glued the white liner to the purple envelope and then adhered the sides to form the envelope.

The final touches on the card were to stamp – party just because on the inside of the card. I took two different shades of purple (milled lavender and dusty concord) and inked up the stamp.Once that was complete, I glued the top of the envelope together and the card is ready to send!

Here are the final results of the card:

Challenge # 8

I was curious to see how much I could do with an embossed image. When I was watching the YouTube and TwoPeas videos, there were a lot of different ideas. As I started going through the ones I wrote down, I found one I thought I could use on this page.

I used a couple of different embossing folders on this layout. I used two different swirled ones to create hearts to compliment the hearts that were on the page already. I used scraps of grey and pink which are two of the main colors in the background page. I used my Fiskars small and extra-large heart punches to create the hearts after I ran the paper through the Cuttlebug.

The last embossing folder I used comes from the Sizzix wedding set. It says Together Forever in a script font. This is where I used a new technique. I took a light grey piece of scrap paper and ran it through the Cuttlebug using the Together Forever folder. Then I used VersaMark and covered the entire surface of the embossed image. Once the VersaMark was on the image, I used clear embossing powder and the heat gum to set the powder. This technique gives you a slightly darker image than the original with a little bit of a shine. I think it makes the embossed image stand out more than if you just left it.

To finish off the page, I took a scrap piece of pink paper and wrote in silver ink a line from a song. I also took a rectangle pink scrap paper and embossed it with the same swirl folder I used on the pink hearts. I placed the Together Forever embossed piece on top of that paper and decided it needed a little something so I took the design scissors and cut a fancy edge around the image.

I then glued all the pieces down and added the pictures. I had placed the pictures side by side with no spacing in between and matted them on the same grey paper I used earlier. I also used a grey chalk ink to lightly ink the edges of the mat.

Here are the results:

Hope this gives you some ideas for new techniques! As always, feel free to comment.