Happy Thanksgiving!

Full of gratitude this Thanksgiving for my loving and devoted family and for wonderful caring friends! I've always wanted to do gifts and cards for Thanksgiving but I'm usually too pre-occupied with trying to get all my Christmas projects done on time. This year I found myself so behind schedule anyway, I figured what the heck! Made up a batch of Furikake Cereal Mix for dh to take to work (using the same recipe I used for the pretzel sticks at Halloween) and just HAD to decorate the bottle. Found the turkey cut on the Cricut Paperdolls cartridge and used nestabilities dies for the circle and scalloped circle.
Knew I wouldn't have time to make any Thanksgiving cards, so I opted to send photo cards instead, with the help of Hallmark.com.

I really enjoy doing my photocards on this website for several reasons. For one, the quality of the cards is unbeatable. The finished cards are printed on heavy card with a really nice, satiny smooth semi-gloss finish on all sides, allowing you to add photos and sentiments to every side of your card. I am always very pleased with how professional the finished card turns out.

Another plus is that I can personalize each individual card with a different sentiment for each recipient. And best of all, I can create my cards online months in advance or just a few
days prior, and Hallmark will mail the card directly to the recipient on the day I specify. The cards range in price from $2-$3, so it costs about the same as going out to purchase a pre-made
card at the card shop. Here, I've also posted some of the other cards I've made and had sent from the Hallmark website. These were birthday cards to dd and dh from our doggie. They were really quick and fun to do!

Oh, and if you are a Hallmark rewards member, you can reap crown rewards on these photo card purchases as well. Whoops!...sorry...I guess I'm starting to sound like some commercial, huh. LOL!

May the Force be with You!

It's R2D2! I'm sure all Star Wars aficionados would recognize this robot (even tho I realized later that the dark blue color is all wrong...) Made this covered slider card for dd's bf's birthday last month. And although this falls in the category of "masculine cards", I must admit I had a blast putting it together. The absolutely amazing cut file for Artoo was created and shared by Susan Bluerobot on her blog. Thank you again, Susan! Susan is a master of Design Studio and of any and all types of paper crafting. Just wait till you see the cut file she created for C3PO, not to mention all her incredible 3-D popup creations. She is awesomely talented, a true inspiration, and always so generous with sharing her cut files, tips and tutorials. Please leave a comment with your thanks if you decide to download any of her files.

The Artoo cut file uses the George cartridge and is amazingly detailed. Susan has even included instructions on how to do all the detailed dry embossing on Artoo's body. This was a bit challenging, but fun and I thought results were well worth the extra time and effort. I didn't have any white glossy cardstock (as recommended) on hand, so I used glossy photo paper instead, which worked quite well as an alternative. I used metallic silver and blue cardstock for the rest of the robot and later realized (after searching the web for images of Artoo) that I probably should have used mat silver and light blue metallic instead.

For the card base I used black glossy and more blue metallic cardstock, and silver glitter cardstock from DCWV. Susan used a red rhinestone for the light on her robot, which I again, did not have, and substituted with a circle punched from red prismatic mylar.

I chose to do a covered slider card; pulling up on the star at the top of the card simultaneously reveals the birthday sentiment and a gift card which slides up from behind Artoo. Very cool, huh. The template for the covered slider card is shared by Chia Wald at Chia's Rubber Stamp Art. The sliding mechanism on this is simple and the pattern can easily be changed to almost any size card.

For a final touch, I added a personalized tag cut with a sizzlits die and tied with silver metallic ribbon. I like to always try and include some sort of personalization on the cards I make as a way for the recipient to know that yes, this card was created just for you!

My "TEE"- RIFFIC Guy

My apologies to dh and dd and others who have been waiting so long for me to post this card. I fall behind in posting my cards on a timely basis because I restrict myself to posting only once a week. I would love to spend more time posting and surfing blogs, but then I find myself spending way too much time on the computer and I am left with very little time to do any actual crafting.

Okay, anyway, this is the card I created for dh's birthday, which was actually a month ago in October. Again, I had a hard time with this because it had to be "MAN"-ly. I knew I wanted it to have a golf theme, since it's dh's favorite passtime and because I wanted it to go with the golf club birthday present he told me I was getting for him.

Since none of the cricut cartridges I own have any golf images on them, I went searching again at the Design Studio forum on the Cricut Message board. Found a few cuts for golf clubs, which I used as a springboard to create my own. Creating cuts on Design Studio doesn't come very easily for me, as I always have difficulty with arcs and angles not looking right...so I ended up spending quite a bit of time sitting and staring at dh's woods, trying to figure out where it should be round and where it should be square. Even with that, my resulting final cut did not look right. I ended up having to snip off the shaft and repositioning it to get the angles right. Times like this makes me wonder why I even bother to spend the time trying to create it on Design Studio... might have been faster to just draw freehand and cut with a pair of scissors!

The tee was a cut file created and generously shared by Jen C., the Design Studio whiz. (Thank you, Jen!) The golf ball was cut with a circle punch from glossy photo paper and embossed with the Cuttlebug Tiny Bubbles folder to add some bumpy texture to it. Kinda neat how it made the ball look realistic!

Then, for a fun dimensional look, I glued the golf ball, tee, and the sentiment to a piece of clear transparency plastic which I adhered to the card front. The golf club (cut from glossy black and metallic silver cardstock) was positioned behind the ball and adhered to the base card. Second photo shows the resulting layers to the front of the card.

Sentiments inside were completely computer generated, the little golf ball and tee images are clipart from Broderbund's Printshop software, colored in with Prismacolor pens.