Golfer's Grad Card

Graduation season is upon us once again and this year I had three graduation cards to put together. This first one was by special request from hubby for a young man in his golf club who graduated from high school this year.

I know I fall back on this same Recessed Window style card front for graduations often but I like it a lot because it's quick to personalize. Since I already have the base card on file, I only needed to change the year of graduation and the graduate's name in Make the Cut design program. (Graduate's full name blocked out in photo). A sheet of clear acetate was placed behind the graduate silhouette and the graduate's high school logo was inserted inside the recessed window. Tutorial for this Recessed Window Card by Lynn Mercurio can be found on Splitcoast Stampers here.

On the inside, I added a Four Step Pop Up Card insert.  

I like using this pop up insert for graduation cards because the four steps are perfect for adding the graduate's class year. For this Four Step Pop Up Card insert, I used the tutorial and template created and shared by Norma on her blog, From My Craftroom.

Since hubby had requested a golf themed grad card, I added a  little golf course scene to the side panel of the pop up stairs. Golf cart cutting file comes from Cricut Everyday Paper Dolls cartridge and the the golf bag and clubs were created from a coloring book image rendered into a cutting file in Make the Cut design program. Background tree border was also created in Make the Cut from an image found on the internet. Oh, and of course I couldn't resist adding the "punny" golf sentiment... "Time to Par-Tee!"

Fathers Day Explosion Box

It's Fathers Day, and believe it or not, I somehow managed to come up with yet another golf themed card for hubby. His Fathers Day card this year was an Explosion Box card... it's been quite awhile since I last made one of these, but have you noticed how creative and clever card makers have continued to evolve the look of the Explosion Box card by adding miniature 3 dimensional scenes inside? Of course I just had to try one with a golf course scene, right!

For the focal point of my golf course scene, I purchased a template for a very cool looking 3-D golf cart/gift card holder designed by Lorri Heiling from her blog, Confessions of A Stamping Addict. I'm not exactly sure on the actual size of  Lori's original golf cart, but I believe her template creates a cart approximately 5 inches long, and 3 inches high where the gift card sits on the roof of the cart. Lorri's cart even has a place on the back of the cart which can hold real golf tees! But for my purposes here, I needed the golf cart to be really, really tiny so it would fit inside my explosion box. I used Make the Cut design program to shrink the template so the finished size of the cart would not be more than 2 inches in length. I also replaced the tee holder from the original template with a miniature golf bag which I made by rolling cardstock into a tube and filling with mini golf clubs cut using  a cutting file created from a coloring book image.

Different than the usual Explosion Box cards where all four sides of the box fall open, I kept two  adjoining sides together so they would remain standing to create a corner for my scene. Luckily, golf course scenes are pretty simple to recreate, so most of the landscape was hand cut. The trees are a Doodlebug cutting file from the Lori Whitlock shop and the clouds were created in Make the Cut.  I added my sentiment to one of sides that falls open and a pocket for a gift card to the other.

Here's the finished box all put together with the lid on. Thought it looked a bit too plain so I snuck a couple of  tees from hubby's stash and added a bow to make it look a little more festive. Not a fancy card, but hoping hubby will like it!

Monthly Baby Birthday Tags

This is a little project I started and committed myself to soon after our granddaughter was born last year. Being that she and her parents live many miles and an ocean away we don't get to spend much time with her and spoil her as much as we'd like to. So hubby and I decided we would send her a little package for each of her monthly birthdays for the first year of her life. To go along with each package, I made birthday tags to celebrate each month.

I kept the shape and size of all the tags are the same, but each was embellished differently. Sometimes I tried to correspond the tag theme with the season or a holiday for that particular month. I added a heart shaped label with the birthday month printed on each tag, and you may have noticed that the number of the month also coincides with the number of one of the embellishments on the tags. Two elephants for 2 months, three giraffes for 3 months and so on. LOL, notice as the month number increased, the embellishments had to get smaller and smaller so I could get them all to fit!

 It's so true what they say about babies growing up too fast! Especially during the first year of life, the number of changes babies  go through from month to month is pretty amazing. It seemed like every month there was something new little Evie had learned to do.

Thinking that these tags will probably be saved as baby keepsakes I took the time each month to pen a special personal message to our granddaughter on the backof the tags about the new things she had learned to do and how much she is loved and missed. I think this might be a neat thing for her later on in life when she is old enough to read them herself.

Evie's First Birthday

In keeping with her birthday theme of "Love you to the moon and back", this is the card I made to celebrate our granddaughter's first birthday. I wanted to include a moon and rocket ship and decided a Bridge Fold card might be the easiest way to depict what I had in mind.

For the rocket ship, I actually used the very same image I had originally created to make the photo booth in my previous post. Only this time, instead of enlarging it, I shrunk the image to about 1-1/2 inches in length and cut it from pretty DCWV glitter cardstock. I used Lawn Fawn's Puffy Cloud  die and Core'dinations white glitter cardstock for the layers of stitched cloud borders, and tied fishing line to the struts inside the card to suspend the glittery and pearly little stars in the sky.

Cloud labels with our sentiments were print and cut on the Silhouette and backed with metallic gold foil board. The bottom cloud is the same one we used for headers on the birthday cooky favors in my last post.

Here's the view from the top which shows the struts on the top and bottom inside the card onto which the fishing line was attached.

Birthday sentiments were added to the back of the card. Although she's probably still much too young to ever remember her first birthday celebration, hopefully photos together with this card will help her parents tell her all about it when she's older.