A Splashin' Good Time

My very talented and good friend, Kris always makes the neatest cards ever, and I have been the lucky recipient of several of them. On one of our recent shopping outings, she presented me with this pivoting pop-up surfing Ian card which I totally fell in love with. When the card is opened, Ian pops up and rides the waves! How cool is that! And oh, did you notice that Ian is a diecut? Kris did such an awesome job of re-creating him with SCAL and her Cricut...love all the details...check out his printed board shorts and even his neck chain! I definitely had to CASE this card... The mechanism that makes Ian ride the waves is an inverted v-fold pivot. I had to disassemble Kris's card to get a good look at it, but later found the pattern for it with very detailed instructions posted by Carol on one of my favorite blogs, Extreme Cards and Papercrafting.

...and so here's my take on Kris' card...

I made this card to send to dd's bf after he stay-cationed with us this summer. One of the funnest things we did was to go jet skiing, so I decided to try a version of Kris' card with jet skiers. Only problem was I couldn't find any good images of tandem jet skiers anywhere. I finally gave up searching and ended up trying to draw my own, and used SCAL and Cricut to cut it. Lol, as you can see, I'm definitely not an artist and it came out a bit goofy looking, but I was desperate! For the water, I used the wave border from Paper Pups, and added a few quickutz dolphins to complete the scene.

For the beach scene on the front of the card, I scanned images from a coloring book, then edited, re-sized, and printed it onto white cardstock. Staedtler Aquarells with a Dove Blender were used to color, and I used foam tape on duplicate images of the coconut tree and umbrella to add dimension.

In the end, I had used so many different types of images that the finished card looked a bit cartooney. But that's okay, I had fun making it, and even more fun playing with it when it was done! With the pivot mechanism in place, opening & closing the card made the jetski bob up and down amongst the waves, reminding me of all the fun we had that day!

"Bee" Back Soon!

Summer's officially over for me once dd returns to school in Cali. This year her summer break was so short and it felt as though we had hardly any time to spend together before it was time for her to leave. Saying goodbye was difficult and I found myself missing her so much when she left.


I found what I thought would be the perfect card to send dd posted on the Cricut Messageboard by Ashley (lovemysoldier). She had created the cutest card ever, and though I usually try not to do blatant scraplifts, for this one I did. It was so perfect, I didn't want to change it too much! Thank you, Ashley!

For this card, I used the beehive cut from Walk In My Garden, welded the shadows in Design Studio to create the base card, and adhered the layers with foam tape. The little bees are from the Pooh and Friends cart, and the cute sign at the front door was simply printed on the computer and cut out. I hung the sign using dmc embroidery floss and a little mini brad.

For the sentiment on the front of the card I decided to try something new. Well, at least "new" for me... I've read about creating your own rub-ons for a while now, but never really had the chance to try it till now. Printing the sentiment directly onto the cardstock prior to cutting out the beehive would have meant a lot time measuring and still a lot of guesswork. But this technique was easy and worked like a charm! First I printed a mirror image of my sentiment using my inkjet printer onto a sheet of transparency. Then after it was dry, I simply used a popsicle stick to rub it on to my card like I would any commercially made rub on. Wallah! If you look very closely enough, you'll see a little bit of bleeding, but imo, hardly noticiable at all. For all the time and frustration it saved me, it's a wonderful technique! Oh, one thing I should mention, this technique doesn't work too well on textured papers. If your cardstock is textured, better to flip it over to the back smooth side to rub your sentiment on.


On the inside of my card, I used the flower cut from Plantin Schoolbook and grass border cut from the ZooBalloo cart. The sentiment was computer generated, fonts are DJ Fancy and DJ Inkers. Chalked everything up and added a few heart shaped raindots from Cloud 9 Designs.

I don't know why, but I've never really made very many shaped cards in the past. This one was so much fun to do, especially with all the layering. Recently I've been seeing some really neat cards like this shared by others on the Cricut Message Board Card Forum and also over at Custom Crops. I know I'll be wanting to try more like this soon!

Everything's Coming Up Roses!

We celebrated my mil's birthday this past weekend, and here's the card I created for her. Decided to do a second try with the flower pot card I had done a few months ago for a card swap. My first card, imo, came out a bit too large so I re-did the cutfile this time around to create a smaller sized card, which I'm much happier with.

For this second card, I also changed the flowers "planted" in the flower pot to the roses from the Walk In My Garden cartridge. Chalked them up and layered them with foam tape for some added dimmension. The base card for the flowers and the insert was created in Design Studio by welding several shadow images of the roses together with a rectangle shape from the George cartridge.

For the flower pot (also from Walk in My Garden cartridge), the bottoms of two flower pot images were welded together in Design Studio to create a pocket for the card insert. The front of this was then chalked and embossed with a Sizzix embossing folder. Added a grosgrain ribbon to the pot and it was done! I really like how this actually came together fairly quickly. Next time around, I think I'll want to experiment with some different types of flowers... poinsettias for Christmas might be cute, huh.