Kiss My Bones

My theme for my Halloween projects this year were the Skelanimals. I first met these little creatures while shopping at Target for Halloween treats last year. I thought they were adorable, and promised myself I'd remember to use them this year. So I visited the Skelanimals official website and learned that there are twenty four different ones, each with their own name and distinct personality! It was a tough decision, but I decided to select just three favorites to work with to start.
Meet "Diego" the Bat...

..."Chung Kee" the Panda...

...and "Kit" the Cat!

I used Make the Cut (MTC) to render my Skelanimals into cut files, then created the tent boxes for them in Design Studio using shapes from the George cartridge. Being that the images were already solid black & white, no further editing was needed and creating the cutfiles for them was super quick 'n easy...just my speed!

I cut several of each out with my Cricut and used them as Make and Take projects shared with friends at a craft club get together and Cricut Club meeting.

Here's how they looked from the back...

Tags were created in Design Studio and "happy halloween" is a stamped image from Good Stamps which I scanned and printed to fit the tags. Tiny bat, ghost and skull cut outs are from a Cuttlebug die.
The round Skelanimals "seals" were created using my new stamping toy...

From PSA Essentials, these stamped images fit into the self inking stamping unit and are all interchangeable. The stamp pads are interchangeable too, and are available in various colors, even ones that allow you to stamp the outer ring in a different color. Cool, huh. The best part about this is that I get a crisp, sharp image everytime...virtually no more boo boos...hurray!

After stamping my Skelanimals in black, I colored in their hearts, punched them out with a circle punch then backed them onto a larger black circle to create my "seals".

I also made several more tent box treats to share with friends at work...had to do these in white since I ran short on the colored card stock, but they came out looking okay.
Also used my Skelanimal friends to decorate gift bags for friends and family...

These smaller brown kraft bags held okoshi (puffed rice candy) and arare (rice crackers) for our aunties...

And these larger gift bags were filled with special goodies for my niece and bff Kris...

Used Cricut Blackletter Font to cut out the "happy halloween" on these.
Then at the last minute, I decided to add a fourth Skelanimal to my collection. Here's "Dax" the dog. Used MTC to create the cut file for Dax and Paper Pups cartridge for his bone.

These were filled with doggie treats for Latte to share with her fellow doggie friends.

Also want to share the many Halloween goodies I received this year...

This adorable Halloween card is from Kris. See how it opens up?

Super neat-o! I just love cards that pop up and move, and Kris is always surprising me with these! And don't you just love that neat "bat fence"? Lots of layering and dimension on this card too...makes this card such a treasure!

More devilishly fun treats from special friends....

From the top left, scary tombstone is from Iris, adorable Hello Kitty bag from Cheryl & Coleen, cute & funny jack-o-lanterns from Teri (black) and Kris (orange), and very cool folded candy holders from Gwen. I am lucky beyond words to have such talented and sharing friends!

And finally, here's the card I created on the Hallmark Cards website (with a little help from Latte) to send to family and friends...LOL! Can you tell that poor Latte was not too thrilled about her cute froggy costume? Though I must say that she has recently become a lot more tolerant of me photographing her in these silly outfits. I guess she has come to the realization that the more cooperative she is, the sooner the torture will end.

Latte: "...BUT I don't wanna be a FROG for Halloween!!!!"

(Have a fun and safe holiday!)

Rockin' Baby

Dh's co-worker who is also my good friend, recently welcomed a brand new baby boy into her family. For her baby's card, I wanted to use a rocking horse image, but just couldn't find one I really liked on any of the Cricut cartridges I own. Finally found one by searching the internet, then used MTC to render it into a cutable file.

Cut the horse out several times and layered and pieced it together using foam dots. Added just a bit of glimmer to the body of the horse with some Tsukineko Shimmer Sparkle Spritz, then adhered the completed rocking horse to a circle and scalloped circle created in Design Studio. I then adhered just the bottom half of the scalloped circle to my easel card base. Embellished a bit with tiny punched hearts on the bottom of the rocker and Robins Nest dewdrops on the corners of the card.

As always, I love to personalize, so I added baby's name to the inside. For this I used a Lettering Delights font, Charming Bold and once again used MTC to render it into a cut file. Stars are plastic buttons from Dress It Up which I "colored" with Copics, then painted with glitter glue.

And finally, the finished card, open and standing as an easel. Still having fun making these and still loving how they always come together without a hitch.

Love and Sakura

We recently received a lovely handmade wedding announcement from the daughter of a close family friend. She used pearlized papers and vellums for her card, and embellished with sakura cuts studded with rhinestones...so pretty! So for our wedding card for the couple, I decided to keep with her pink & silver color scheme and modern Asian tone.

Using Design Studio, I welded the kanji character for the word "love" from the Pagoda cartridge into a circle frame created using the George cartridge. This was cut from a pink mylar cardstock, then adhered to a circle window, backed with pink pearlized paper. I used this same pearlized paper to punch out tiny sakura blossoms but since I didn't have any tiny rhinestones on hand, I had to improvise using a 1/16th inch hole punch and DCWV glitter cardstock for the centers of the blossoms.

Base cardstock is Currency Silver and white background cardstock is Bazzill Bling, embossed with my favorite Plum Blossom Cuttlebug embossing folder. Added the bride and groom's names (Edwardian Script ITC font) and some ribbon for the final touch. Something new I learned here...by selecting a grey tone color on my inkjet printer and using a pearlized paper (I used Bazzill Diamond Bling) to print on, it almost looked like I had used a silver metallic ink! Very cool...I wonder if using a dark yellow tone would create the effect of gold metallic ink?

Cricut Club Recipe Book

For the our first "big group project", the Cricut Club decided to do a recipe page swap. Recipe pages were to be 8x8 with at least one element on the page cut using the Cricut. I chose to do mine on one of my favorite desserts, Strawberry Jello Dessert.
At each meeting prior to the September deadline we set for ourselves, four or five of us shared a sneak peak of our work in progress recipe page together our dish prepared for everyone to sample.
For my page, I used the cutesy mouse from my favorite Create A Critter cart together with the strawberry from the Paisley cart. Welded letters from Don Juan in Design Studio for the title and used Make The Cut to do a cut from a sketch I had drawn for the dessert piece.

Seemed simple enough, but making 21 pages for the swap was a bit of a challenge!
Here's a photo of my dessert made up and ready to take to the meeting to share...

And here's a glimpse of some of the awesome pages that were created by the other participants, waiting to be put into albums.

This was certainly a lot of work, but I think everyone who participated will agree that in the end, it was well worth it. I love my album of recipes, and even better, I've already had the chance to taste every delicious one!

Dear Friends

Here's the box I created to hold some pizelles I made to share with a couple of my bff from high school when we recently got together for tea this summer. Created in Design Studio using the George cartridge, I like that it's large and can hold nearly a dozen cookies. Because of it's size, this needed to be cut using the larger 12 x 24" mat, and uses 2 sheets of 12 x 12 cardstock.

The deer, flowers and butterfly are all from my favorite Create A Critter cartridge. Circle and scallop circle for this had to be created in Design Studio since my Nestabilities weren't quite large enough. Circle was embossed with a Sizzix embossing folder, background paper is from Nancy Kubo's digital collection, and the words "Dear Friend" are from Paisley & Create A Critter carts.

I just can't get over how cute all of designer Nancy Kubo's critters in the Create A Critter cartridge are. Seriously, I can see myself using every single cut in this cartridge...hmmm...don't think I could say that of any other of the 40+ carts I own! Wanna see more cute stuff by Nancy Kubo? Visit Little Dreamer Designs to see lots of downloadable paper and graphics by Nancy. I have my fingers crossed that she'll be doing another cartridge for Provocraft in the future!