Obon Festival Treats

As summer winds down to a close, so too does the Obon Festival season here in the islands. But before it ends, I want to share this FABULOUS little treat box my sweet and uber talented friend Lorna brought by for me the other day. How CUTE is this!!!!

Lorna designed her adorable box to resemble the "yagura" or tower where the musicians sit and play during bon dances. Notice the Poppystamps party lantern dies she colored to look like the familiar obon chochin? Filled with treats, she created these boxes to share with her friends in her Bon Dance club.
Lorna adorned each of the four sides of her box with a different Sister Stamps image...

Here's Sister Stamps' Yoshi and Kiyomi, dancing their hearts out!

Together with Yoichi on the taiko drum and Yoshimi with her fans....

Inside the box is filled with an assortment of Japanese snacks...YUM!

I think you'll agree that Lorna's treat box is totally AWESOME! Don't know how she comes up with these fabulous ideas, but this girl's creative genius is just out of this world! Thank you, Lorna!!!!

Panda Note Holders

Holy Kamoly! Just realized this is already the last week in August! Went shopping this past weekend and saw that Halloween stuff has already hit the floors at many of the stores and the clerks at our local craft store were filling their shelves with Christmas decorations! Wow, talk about a wake up call! LOL, and I thought I was starting early by working on these little panda noteholder magnets for my mom's senior citizen group holiday craft sale. Just so happens my turn to share for our Cricut Club is coming up too, so I decided to make a whole bunch of these to take care of both projects at  once.

The idea for these came from my dear crafting friend, Lorna, who made these post it note holders for us for Mothers Day. Lorna decorated hers with an adorable stamped and paper pieced kokeshi doll image from Dandelion Designs. Not only were these very cute, but so useful too, and I thought they would work well as a quick and easy craft fair project. I took the measurements from the one Lorna had given me and created a cutfile for it in MTC so I could have my Silhouette cut several at once. After gluing and assembling the boxes, I thought it would be a neat idea to add magnets to the backs so people could stick them on to their filing cabinets at work or refrigerators at home.

Isn't this panda a cutie? Found him online by doing a Google image search for "kawaii panda" and had MTC convert him into a cutfile. Wanted a bamboo branch for my panda but I wasn't too successful in finding a suitable image online so I ended up drawing my own and rendered it into a cutfile.
Wrapped a belly band of washi paper and shimmery gold text weight paper around the box and added panda to the front with some foam squares. All done.
Okay, two projects down...bring on the next!

Welcome Baby Building Blocks Card

Had another baby card to make, and as much as I enjoy making the Blocks type card (so quick and easy!) for baby cards, I figured it was time to try something a little different. Been seeing many Building Block cards on Pinterest, and decided to give it a try. You can find the tutorial for this by Laura Lipe over at Splitcoast Stampers. This is what it looks like when it's open:

I actually altered my card just a bit from the original by adding five blocks instead of four as in the tutorial. "Why?" Because I'm always making dumb mistakes. The entire time I was planning this card out, I thought the baby's name was "LUCAS".. I thought, "Oh no, I'm gonna have to figure out a way to add another block so baby's name will fit!" Spent a lot of time re-doing the dimensions and calculations for this card just to get that extra fifth block onto this card. Then just as I die cut baby's name (used Quickutz Blossom Mini dies) and was about to adhere them to the blocks, I suddenly remembered baby's name was really "LUKE" and not "LUCAS"... DUH!!!  And hence you see the heart and star shapes I added to the unneeded fifth block...sigh...

Okay, on to the embellishing...used a label cut from the Lacy Labels Cricut Cartridge for the sentiment on the front and added a few fun star shaped buttons from Dress It Up.

Elephant cut comes from Cricut Create A Critter Cartridge....

...and Giraffe on end panel also from Create A Critter Cartridge.

Managed to squeeze in the sentiment on the inside narrow panel next to the blocks...

And here's a view from the top. Here you'll see that I completely snipped off the thin strips of cardstock between the blocks which are supposed to fold toward the back of the card and replaced them with a blue cardstock panel which I adhered to the back of the base card. In the end, having avoided the disaster of putting the wrong name on the card, I was satisfied with how it turned out...LOL, may even try this type of card again, now that I know I can alter the number of blocks on this...

A Kokeshi Box Card for a Special Friend

Here's a birthday card I put together for my bestest blogging pal, Patti of Creations By Patti blog. It's another box style card, but with windows on all four panels; I believe it's called a "Go Round Card". This is only the second time I've attempted this type of card (first one was for my daughter's birthday last year). And since I have yet to find a tutorial for this card, making this continues to be a "big experiment" for me.
For Patti's card, I knew I had to go with her favorite Asian theme. I was inspired by shoji screen type table lamps like these...

...and decided I would use the delightful kokeshi dolls from the books by Annelore Parot to adorn her card.

Here's a view of the first two panels:

And the next two panels:

The box panels with windows were created in MTC by joining and welding rectangles, ovals and fancy label shapes together. MTC also rendered the kokeshi and panda images into cutting files which were cut using a Silhouette Cameo.

Here's Michiko and Emi....

...Yumi and Aoki....

...and of course little panda.

I used a Quickutz die to cut the branches and sakura blossoms are cut from Punch Bunch and Carl punches. A 1/16-inch EK circle punch was used for the flower centers. Kokeshi faces were cut from white cardstock and colored with Copics; and kimonos were cut from digitized washi paper.

Here's a peek at the bottom of the box which shows how the struts that hold each kokeshi doll in place are adhered to the inside of the box. As you can see, the construction is very similar to the struts inside the very popular "Card In A Box" type card except the struts on this card run parallel to the four sides and are adhered to each other as well as to the inside of the box.

And finally, here's the card flattened, which needed a box type envelope about a half inch in depth to fit in. I have to admit it took me quite awhile to finish this card. Though it was quite challenging and fun, I don't think I'll have the time or patience to do this card too often. I guess you could say this was a one of a kind card for my one of a kind very, very special friend!

Another Accordion Birthday Card

Still having fun playing with my Elizabeth Craft Designs Oval Accordion Card die by Karen Burniston. This time for a birthday card for my sil. I'm finding this die really comes in handy especially when I'm in a pinch for time and need to come up with a card FAST!

This time around I used Mariko and Miyoko from Sister Stamps to decorate my card. Colored them up with Copics and placed them on the oval panels embossed with a Darice Cherry Blossom embossing folder. Since the cherry blossom outlines on this particular folder are very thin, I swiped the folder with a pink inkpad prior to putting it through my Big Shot to make them show up better. The birthday sentiment on the center panel is computer generated, using Janda Stylish Script, A850-Deco, and New Zurica fonts. Tiny double layered blossoms were made using Punch Bunch and Carl sakura punches.

Pretty much happy with how this card turned out, considering I was in such a rush to finish it in time. Really glad I decided to invest in this accordion die. One thing that's great about these Pop It Up's dies are that they are thin dies so they don't take up a lot of room. Designer Karen Burniston has come up with lots of new ones with neat matching accessories too! I simply couldn't resist and picked up the circle and fancy label ones too...planning to hopefully use them for my holiday cards later this year....we'll see!