Quickie Thanksgiving Treat Bags

Talk about last minute! Just a few hours before leaving for dinner at my sil's for our family Thanksgiving get together, I quickly put the goodies I bought to give to our relatives into giftbags. I knew I didn't have time to decorate them... but the plain brown kraft bags looked so sad!

Had to think of something really simple and quick! I went over to my favorite place for digital images, My Grafico. They had a 50% sitewide sale going on (yay!) and I grabbed this cute little gobbler from JW Illustrations. Isn't he adorable?

Added a sentiment, printed, then used my nestabilities to cut him out and add a scalloped border. Very simple, but done in less than an hour...and much happier than the sad naked brown bags! Hope everyone is enjoying the Thanksgiving weekend!

Hippo Birdie Two Ewe!

Yet another silly card, this one made for dd's fiance's birthday.  Always wanted to do a "Hippo Birdie" card, and with all the cute animal images available on some of the Cricut cartridges, I just couldn't resist.

For this card, I used the hippo and birdie from Create A Critter, lambs from the Easter Seasonal Cartridge, and cake from Simply Charmed. Balloons were cut from the CottageCutz Birthday Pup die.

I used a simple pop up to attach the cake to the inside of the card. The balloons were glued onto a piece of clear acetate on which I drew in the balloon strings with a Sharpie. Acetate piece was then adhered to the back of the cake.

Hippo and lambs were attached on an angled pop-up. The concept of creating an angled pop-up is simple; fold the card in half and cut an angled strip from the fold. On the other hand, getting the desired angle was a bit trickier and took me a few tries on scrap paper before I got it just right.

Hopefully dd's fiance enjoyed this silly birthday greeting... even though he got a year older, I hope he'll always remain a little bit of a kid at heart.

QR Code Fun

Not too long ago, one of my favorite bloggers, Carol of Extreme Cards and Papercrafting posted a project where she wove strips of paper together to replicate a QR code birthday message for a friend. The weaving project was way out of my league, but the novel idea of using a QR code (Quick Response code) to send a message really had me intrigued! That's when I knew I just had to do a "techie" anniversary card for my geekie dh...

I went over to the QR Code Platform site recommended by Carol to generate a couple of messages, printed them out and added them to my card. The QR code reader is a free app dh has on his Droid, so when he scanned the code on the front of the card with his phone, the message  "Happy Anniversary!" appears. Very cool! To keep with the techie theme, I used robots from the Robtz cartridge to represent the two of us. Cutfile for the gears were created in MTC using an image found on the web.

Then to add to the silliness, I used a slider on the inside of the card so the pink robot would slide on over to get closer to the the blue robot as the card is opened. You can find the instructions for this "Moving Card" shared by Lynn  from Ben Franklin Crafts on her blog. Thank you, Lynn!

Lastly, I added my second QR code ("I Love You!") to the inside of the card. Wow! I can hardly believe that we've been married for 31 years already....it's been a wonderful journey and I'm so very fortunate to have spent it with my best friend!

For My Favorite Swinger!

Here's a kind of silly but fun little card I made to help celebrate dh's birthday last month...

Decided to use a recessed window for the front of my card for the monkey to peek out of. He comes from the Create A Critter cartridge and his banana from Preserves. Tree branches are from ZooBalloo, and wooden sign frame from Pooh and Friends. Happy Birthday sentiment is Ariel font, created and welded in MTC.

Here's how the card opens up...

A little difficult to simulate the motion with stills, but basically the little monkeys swing down on the vine as the card is opened. Yes, it's me trying to practice doing the old "v-fold pivot" mechanism again! You can get a better idea of the construction and workings of this mechanism illustrated and explained by Carol over at Extreme Cards and Papercrafting. Even after many tries at this, I still haven't figured this out completely. It usually takes me several tries at moving the position of the pivoting arm around before I can get it to swing just right. LOL, but when I finally got it placed correctly, it was so much fun to open and close the card (again and again...) to watch the monkeys swing!