Daughter's First Mothers Day

Today our daughter celebrates her very first Mothers Day. Hubby and I became proud grandparents just a little over two weeks ago and I was so excited for my daughter that I started working on a Mothers Day card for her even before making ones for my own mom and mother in law..naughty me!

I decided to do a Tri-fold Screen  card, also known as a Tri-Fold Shadow Box card. I used an old cutfile I created a few years back for this style of card but found that I had to spend quite a bit of time resizing it. Later, I found a ready made cut file in the Lori Whitlock Shop... darn, wish I had seen that earlier; it would have saved me alot of stress and time! The center panel of this card is a shadowbox, where I added a silhouette of a mom and her baby.  Texture was added to the panel inside the shadowbox using the Hearts and Flowers embossing folder from Sizzix. Heart flourish on the bottom of the frame is a cut file from Miss Kate's Cuttables.

My sentiments were added to the two side panels...

...and a simple belly band keeps the trifold card closed.

Hope everyone is enjoying a relaxing Mothers Day with family today.

Fenghuang: the Auspicious Chinese Phoenix

As you might imagine, coming up with a card worthy enough to send  my blogging pal, Patti for her birthday was quite a challenge for me. If you've seen any of Patti's amazing creations on her blog, you know what I mean! For starters, I knew it had to be RED (her fave color) and Asian (her fave theme).
After much deliberation, I finally chose to go with a tri-fold screen card. I knew I had to fix and tweak the original cutfile I used to make my first tri-fold screen card to fulfill an earlier cutfile request, so this gave me the opportunity to test the file before sharing it.
For my background papers, I chose papers from the Garden Zen collection from Lettering Delights(red) and the Dreams of Japan collection from Jazzy Patterns (pink). The seal on the bellyband is simply a Chinese long life sticker framed with a Martha Stewart Caning Pattern punch.

And here's what the card looks like in the inside... I decided I wanted to use an image of the auspicious phoenix, a legendary symbol of good fotrune, opportunity & luck to Asian cultures. It took many hours searching the internet but I finally came across an image I liked and felt would be suitable for rendering into a cutfile. Cleaned it up in Photoshop and MTC easily created the cutfile.

Metallic & glittery mylar sticker paper adhered to cardstock were used to cut out the phoenix, which I popped up with dimmensionals onto a background embossed with one of the folders from the Cuttlebug Asian Bundle.

I especially loved all the intricate cuts on the phoenix, and it was such a joy knowing my Silhouette machine would not disappoint me!

Inside sentiments are computer generated and printed, using AR Decode and Chopin fonts, then cut into panels by the Silhouette. Added gold Robin's Nest dewdrops to the feet of the center screen as a final touch.

Had fun putting this card together, and amazingly I was able to get it finished and in the mail in time for Patti's birthday! Hoping she likes it as much as I had fun making it....

For My Daughter, the Bride to Be...

So here it is finally...my version of the neat-o tri-fold screen card created by Aunty Mollie a long while back! I wanted to do a special card to include with dd's shower gift, so I finally sat down with Aunty Mollie's beautiful card to try and figure out a way to come up with something similar. Using her card as a template, I traced the shape of the base card onto a piece of paper, scanned it, then had MTC trace it into a cuttable file.

Here's how the card looks on the inside after removing the belly band...

I think the hardest part was to get a cuttable file for the frame on the inside of the card that would fit just right and allow the two sides of the card to close nicely flat. It took a bit of fiddling around, but I was finally able to size the frame so it would fit.

Wedding gown inside the frame was put together with scallop circles cut from ice gold text weight paper using dies from the small and large set of Nestabilities. These were then folded and layered by adhering one inside the other. Scallop edges were then stickled and embellished with pearls.

Just about the time I was putting this card together was about the same time we had just finished folding the 1001 origami cranes for dd's wedding... And since I wanted to add some Asian flavor to my card to go with my mom's Asian themed shower centerpieces and favors, I decided to use my Carl Craft origami crane punch to punch out a few gold cranes to add behind the dress and to the bellyband. The resulting finished card was nowhere near as awesome as Aunty Mollie's, but dd seemed pretty happy with it!

Ok, I guess that wraps it up for the wedding shower stuff...now on to the wedding preparations!