Scoops of Fun!

It seems lately I've had a fixation for making interactive cards that swing and swipe... and here's yet another, this time using Karen Burniston's Spinner Square Pop Up die. 

For this card for my dear niece's birthday, I used  Marjorie Ann Designs' "Cool Treats" and "We Go Togehter Like Ice Cream and Cone" SVG files to cut and piece together my bears and ice cream treats.

As the card is opened, the bear with the double scoop ice cream cone pops forward and another teddy appears from behind him to add another scoop of ice cream to the sundae.

Honestly, I am just having way too much fun with this style of card! Hoping to come up with more fun ideas on how to use this mechanism.

Mothers Day Surprises

Want to share some of the sweet and thoughtful handmade surprises I received for Mothers Day this year from two crafty friends.

This beautiful Mothers Day "card in a box" card filled with delicate and intricately cut flowers was created by my dear friend Bev, who always tells me she's "not crafty" and "doesn't like to craft much". Wow, pretty amazing for someone who thinks they're not crafty, right? Love the soft colors and the flatback pearl centers... so pretty!

This pair of adorable house shaped treat holders was created by my super talented friend, Lorna. You may have noticed the one on the top is the westernized house, and the one underneath is a Japanese style house with the shoji doors and little kimono clad girl. No matter where in the world you may reside, its still the same... "Home is where your Mom is..." , so true, right?
Thank you Bev and Lorna for the special surprises, and for making me feel so special!

Mothers Day Wiper Cards

I had grand plans to present our moms with fancy flowers in a pot pop up cards for Mothers Day this year but somewhere along the line I got frustrated with the mechanism of the card not working as smoothly as I had hoped and opted to just go with a simpler wiper style card this year instead.

Found some very cute Doodlebug flower and butterfly cutting files from the Simply Spring Collection over at the Lori Whitlock store that I thought would work well with my card. To save some time, I had my Silhouette cut all the pieces for the flowers and butterflies from plain white cardstock and used my Copic pens to color all the pieces while they were still on the mat. I added stickles and gemstone accents to the centers of the flowers for some fun sparkle. The banner on the front of the card was created using  a banner cut file and the print and cut feature in Make the Cut.

As the card is pulled open, a little butterfly flies up from behind the flowers. For the wiper mechanism, I used one of the wipers from Mama Elephant's "Wiper Surprise" die. But since I ended up making my cards wider than the original die card size, I had to extend the length of the die cut wiper arm by adding a strip of clear acetate to get the butterfly to pop up where I wanted it to.

You can see the acetate strip extension  onto which the butterfuly is attached in this photo taken from the top of the card. I've come to realize that although assembling the base of this card is very easy, sometimes it can get tricky when trying to get the wiper element to hide and pop up right where you want it to. Lots of experimenting, trial and error, but once you got it to work, its so cool!                                                             

Lots of room on the backside of the card to add our loving sentiments to our dear sweet moms.

And since I thought our mom's might not know how to "open" their cards, I printed these instructions to include with their cards! Lol! Happy Mothers Day!

Celebrating Boys Day with Kintaro

May 5th is Tango no Sekku and Kodomo No Hi or Children's Day in Japan. Originally celebrated as Boys Day, many families display doll, sword and helmet collections in their home and fly Koinobori or carp windsocks outside. And every year, my sweet and talented crafty friend Lorna puts together an amazing Asian inspired treat box to celebrate the day. This year she featured an adorable paper pieced "Kintaro" with his ax, together with cute little flying carp!

"Kintaro"  or "Golden Boy" is well known in Japanese children folklore as a little boy with super human strength. He is often portrayed in ceramic or porcelain as a doll or figurine displayed during Boys Day.

I haven't made anything for Boys Day for quite a while, but I thought this might be a good time to share these Pochacco popcorn boxes I put together recently. Earlier this year I had to come up with a quick and simple box to hold some Cheetos/Bugles/Fritos snack mix I wanted to share with some friends. I decided to try a popcorn box that looked like Pochacco...LOL, when I finished the first one I thought it looked so strange, but when hubby saw it, he immediately recognized it as Pochacco... "Hey, that's Pochacco!" So I decided to go with it.

Anyways, the main thing was that it was really quick to put together and large enough to hold the snack mix!