Transformer Birthday Wishes

Here's the card I created and sent to dd's bf last month for his birthday. Ah yes, another masculine birthday card, this time starring Bumblebee, the yellow autobot transformer. He was a svg file generously shared by Cricut Message Board member Mary, on her blog, Mardenz. Mary did an awesome job re-creating this as a svg file and I was very impressed at how cleanly it cut with SCAL...thank you so much, Mary! BTW, if you own SCAL and are looking for svg files, you must visit Mardenz to browse through all the wonderful files Mary has created and shares...from Star Wars to Lion King to Harry Potter...just amazing!



Okay, so if you're hardcore into transformers, you'll probably notice that Mary's Bumblebee cut looks more like the Generation I autobot which transforms from a Volkswagen Bug. But since this card was supposed to be the prelude to a birthday gift which included the newly released Transformers Movie Blueray disc, I decided to go with the yellow Chevy Camaro of the Generation II Bumblebee instead.






Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find an svg file for a Camaro anywhere. There were a few good line drawings on the web, so I figured I could easily convert one into to svg file using Inkscape and Susan Bluerobot's trusty tutorials. No such luck. I'm still not sure why, but I really had a hard time with this. Either my settings are off, or I'm just not doing something right... well anyway, I finally got it done after many tries but still wasn't very happy with the final result. Couldn't get Cricut to cut the grillwork on the front of the car correctly ( I ended up drawing it in) and the car pieces just didn't seem to fit right. Still got a lot to learn about using Inkscape.

I made the card into a tiered tri-fold card using some of my Basic Grey stash, cutting the tiers by hand, then inking all the edges. The sentiment on the front of the card is computer generated, using a font called "Transformer" (of course!) from my favorite free font site, daFont. Inside sentiment and transformer mask were printed on vellum. Added dewdrops from Robin's Nest to accent the corners.


Added Bumblebee to the last fold in the card using a simple parallel pop up to just the top half of his body so his legs would hang free. In the end, despite the problems I ran into with the creating the Camaro, I was pretty happy with how this turned out, and even happier to hear that dd's bf enjoyed it.