Instacube Photo Cube for Mom

I have another Instacube pop up cube card to share today. Had to make this one for my mil's recent birthday since she was one of the last few in our family who had not received this style of card from us yet.

I chose recent photos of her son, granddaughter and great granddaughter to use on four sides of the cube,

and added the birthday sentiment to the back.

This rubber band activated cube is easily flattened, and slides nicely into it's pocket envelope which I embellished with a rose and banner print and cut image from Miss Kates Cuttables. I created a shadow layer for it using metallic gold cardstock and adhered it to a panel which had been run through Cuttlebug's Wicker Weave embossing folder for texture. The Instacube card continues to be a favorite and fun card for me to make and give. Cutting file, template and tutorial  for this can be found at the Lori Whitlock Shop.

Panda Spinner Square Pop Up

I am in awe of Karen Burniston and her talent of always coming up with new cutting dies that make the funnest interactive pop up cards! I recently purchased her Spinner Square Pop Up die and couldn't wait to try it out on this birthday card for a special friend. Since I wanted to gift her a Starbucks giftcard, I chose a cute panda in a mug image and created a paper piecing cut file for it using Make the Cut design program.

As the card is opened, the panel with the panda and doughnut you saw from the window on the front of the card pops forward and *surprise!* another panda appears from behind, bearing a gift card!

So fun, right? The most amazing thing is that the actual pivot style mechanism which creates all this fun pop up and spinning action is a just small strip of cardstock with scorelines cut from Karen Burniston's magical die. Probably the hardest part is remembering where to fold and where to apply glue. I had to watch Karen's assembly tutorial video several times to make sure I got it right. Just need to play around with it  a few more times and I think I'll have it down. Looking forward to trying the almost endless possibilities for making different kinds of pop ups with this fun pivot mechanism!

Taiko Drum Master Birthday

One of my dearest friends is a "taiko mom". Both her daughter and son in law are avid taiko drummers, so when I recently came across some cute images of characters in a taiko video game called "Taiko Drum Master", I decided to create some cutfiles to use on a birthday card for her. Thought this would be a good chance to play around with my revised Hexagonal Base Pop Up base as well. As mentioned a couple weeks back, this card type was inspired by a combination of Mitosu Crafts' Hexagonal Base Pop Up card as well as Hallmark Cards Wonderfold card.

I never knew about this drumming video game until I came across the cute drum character images on the internet purely by chance. Here are the main game characters twin brother taiko drums, Don and Katsu Wada.

And behind them are Tetsuo Wada and his neighbor, Hana.

Here's the backside of the card where I added a the birthday sentiment and two more characters, Alumi and Donko.

Side view of the card where you can see the struts (blue) that are threaded through the floor panel to hold the paper pieced characters in place.

And here's how the card looks when flattened. One of the nicest things about this card is that it's super easy for the recipient to figure out how to "open", so no instructions required.

Beary Special Friends Treat Caddy

Got together with some very special friends this past week and needed to put together a few treat boxes to fill with goodies to share.

Inspired by some of the cute decorated treat holders seen on Pinterest, I tried to recreate something similar in Make the Cut design program by welding a bracket label shape together with rectangle and oval shapes.

Next time I make this, I will probably want to increase the depth of these holders. I made these with an 1-1/2 inch gusset but these turned out to be just a teensy bit too snug for the snacks I wanted to put inside.

Used a paper pieced sitting teddy from Cuddly Cute Designs' Winter Bears set to decorate the front of the treat holders. "Beary Special" and "Friends" banner was created with Expose and Ballerina true type fonts and the shadow function in Make the Cut.
I like that these treat holders were easy to put together and decorate, and will most likely be using this again soon.