Quickie Thanksgiving Treat Bags

Talk about last minute! Just a few hours before leaving for dinner at my sil's for our family Thanksgiving get together, I quickly put the goodies I bought to give to our relatives into giftbags. I knew I didn't have time to decorate them... but the plain brown kraft bags looked so sad!

Had to think of something really simple and quick! I went over to my favorite place for digital images, My Grafico. They had a 50% sitewide sale going on (yay!) and I grabbed this cute little gobbler from JW Illustrations. Isn't he adorable?

Added a sentiment, printed, then used my nestabilities to cut him out and add a scalloped border. Very simple, but done in less than an hour...and much happier than the sad naked brown bags! Hope everyone is enjoying the Thanksgiving weekend!

Hippo Birdie Two Ewe!

Yet another silly card, this one made for dd's fiance's birthday.  Always wanted to do a "Hippo Birdie" card, and with all the cute animal images available on some of the Cricut cartridges, I just couldn't resist.

For this card, I used the hippo and birdie from Create A Critter, lambs from the Easter Seasonal Cartridge, and cake from Simply Charmed. Balloons were cut from the CottageCutz Birthday Pup die.

I used a simple pop up to attach the cake to the inside of the card. The balloons were glued onto a piece of clear acetate on which I drew in the balloon strings with a Sharpie. Acetate piece was then adhered to the back of the cake.

Hippo and lambs were attached on an angled pop-up. The concept of creating an angled pop-up is simple; fold the card in half and cut an angled strip from the fold. On the other hand, getting the desired angle was a bit trickier and took me a few tries on scrap paper before I got it just right.

Hopefully dd's fiance enjoyed this silly birthday greeting... even though he got a year older, I hope he'll always remain a little bit of a kid at heart.

QR Code Fun

Not too long ago, one of my favorite bloggers, Carol of Extreme Cards and Papercrafting posted a project where she wove strips of paper together to replicate a QR code birthday message for a friend. The weaving project was way out of my league, but the novel idea of using a QR code (Quick Response code) to send a message really had me intrigued! That's when I knew I just had to do a "techie" anniversary card for my geekie dh...

I went over to the QR Code Platform site recommended by Carol to generate a couple of messages, printed them out and added them to my card. The QR code reader is a free app dh has on his Droid, so when he scanned the code on the front of the card with his phone, the message  "Happy Anniversary!" appears. Very cool! To keep with the techie theme, I used robots from the Robtz cartridge to represent the two of us. Cutfile for the gears were created in MTC using an image found on the web.

Then to add to the silliness, I used a slider on the inside of the card so the pink robot would slide on over to get closer to the the blue robot as the card is opened. You can find the instructions for this "Moving Card" shared by Lynn  from Ben Franklin Crafts on her blog. Thank you, Lynn!

Lastly, I added my second QR code ("I Love You!") to the inside of the card. Wow! I can hardly believe that we've been married for 31 years already....it's been a wonderful journey and I'm so very fortunate to have spent it with my best friend!

For My Favorite Swinger!

Here's a kind of silly but fun little card I made to help celebrate dh's birthday last month...

Decided to use a recessed window for the front of my card for the monkey to peek out of. He comes from the Create A Critter cartridge and his banana from Preserves. Tree branches are from ZooBalloo, and wooden sign frame from Pooh and Friends. Happy Birthday sentiment is Ariel font, created and welded in MTC.

Here's how the card opens up...

A little difficult to simulate the motion with stills, but basically the little monkeys swing down on the vine as the card is opened. Yes, it's me trying to practice doing the old "v-fold pivot" mechanism again! You can get a better idea of the construction and workings of this mechanism illustrated and explained by Carol over at Extreme Cards and Papercrafting. Even after many tries at this, I still haven't figured this out completely. It usually takes me several tries at moving the position of the pivoting arm around before I can get it to swing just right. LOL, but when I finally got it placed correctly, it was so much fun to open and close the card (again and again...) to watch the monkeys swing!

Trick Or Treat, Smell My Feet...Here's the last of my Halloween Treats!

When I first saw this adorable Cottage Cutz die, I thought it would be cute to use on tags to accompany my Witchy Shoe favor boxes. But after cutting out all the little pieces on this, I knew there was no way I would have the time!

Ended up making just one card using this die...gonna just have to put this die away for now and hopefully have more time to play with this again next year!

So instead of spending time on the tags, I decorated some gift bags for Halloween treats for Latte's doggie friends. A lot less pieces involved, and a lot quicker to put together!

Jack-o-lantern for this came from the Paperdolls Dress Up cartridge, and the doggie cut actually originates from a Christmas Dog and Sled Cottage Cutz die.
My last Halloween "project" for this year were these Jello treats I made to share at our Cricut Club meeting and for dh and I to take to work...

In keeping with the Halloween color scheme, I used orange Jello for the cream cheese layer and lime jello for the top. Decorated them with Jack-o-Lantern Peeps, which I cut apart and added green icing to for the stems.
And finally, here are some of the wonderful treats I came home with from our Cricut meeting on Sunday...

Red Velvet cupcake (delicious!) shared by Jean...she topped them off with a cutie patootie ghost from 3 Birds On Parade...

A plethora of Halloween treats created & generously shared by the Cricuteers!

A fun spooky pop-up card and adorable decorated snack cup from my special friend, Kris. Check out this card...see how the ghosts pop up from the mansion when you pull up on the tab? Very, very, COOL! And isn't Hello Kitty just adorable dressed up in her 3-D pumpkin outfit? LOVE it! Hope you are having a fun Halloween!

For Fashionista Witches...

Okay, so I was all set to make little milkbox haunted houses to fill with Halloween treats this year... but then I came across these wickedly adorable Witches' Shoes created and shared by Cindy Louh on her website, Skip To My Lou.  There was no way I could pass up giving these a try!

I used the templates Cindy shared and had MTC trace them into cutfiles with scorelines. Used Bazzill Bling cardstock to cut the shoes so they'd have a bit of sheen to them. I especially loved that Cindy included a lining template for the shoes...I used some freebie  Halloween digital papers snatched from My Grafico to line my witchy shoes...really makes them look festive, don't you think?

Dressed up the front of the shoe with some black tulle dotted with stickles glitter, a sheer ribbon bow and some ghoulish shapes cut from a Cuttlebug Halloween die then glossed up with JudiKins Diamond Glaze.

Shoes were then filled with cellophane sleeves of deliciously sinful chocolates, wrapped in black tulle. Put together  a little over a dozen of these to share with my fashionista "ghoul" friends...a little time consuming, but so much fun to put together!

Bone Rattling Fun

It's Halloween weekend already and I'm still trying to finish up all my projects! Honestly, I thought I started early enough this year, but everything seemed to take longer than I had expected. This fun card for dd's fiance was the first project I finished. I think it's called a double slider box card and it was inspired by one I received from my dear friend Kris two years ago. (See Kris' card here ) Loved Kris' card and have been wanting to try this but never had the chance till now!

See the green ribbon loop on the right side of the card? Pull on it and...

*Surprise*! Out from the left side slides a box filled with treats!

How cool is that! You can find the template for the box shared by Sharon (Sweetiepeas) on the Splitcoast Stampers forum. I have to admit that when I first got a look at Sharon's template, I thought "NO WAY"! In fact I had to stare at it and study it several times before I got enough nerve to attempt it. Don't worry...once you get started on it, it really isn't as complicated as it looks! I went ahead and created a cutfile for it in Design Studio using the George cartridge so I wouldn't have to worry about all the measuring next time I decide to do another one...maybe for Christmas? 

Front of the card was fun to do! Tombstones, tree and sentiment are from the Happy Haunting cartridge, stickle glittered moon was cut from a circle punch, and bats and skeleton are from old Quickutz dies.