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.

Hexagonal Base Pop Up Card, Revised!

Here's a birthday card I created for my dear friend Patti which is sort of a revised version of the Hexagonal Pop Up Card like the one in my previous post. I came up with this revised card when I recently noticed that the Hallmark Wonderfolds cards I love so much are actually very similar in construction to Mitosu Crafts'  Hexagonal Pop Up Cards.

The main difference in the two cards is that the Wonderfolds have a elevated floor panel inside the hexagonal box with slits cut into it. The design elements of the card (bridge, tree, girl) are attached to tabs which are threaded through these slits and anchored inside to the bottom of the box. After a little bit of fiddling and playing around, I added an extra panel to the original Hexagonal Pop Up Card template and to come up with this card.

I embellished the card in Patti's favorite color (red) and favorite Asian theme. The cute paper pieced China girl cutting file is SVG Cutting File's Chibi Chinese New Year Girl and the tree is a cutting file from Cricut's Pagoda cartridge. Metal die from Lala Land was used to cut the bridge and the Chinese Landscape background die is from Amy Design.

I've been leaving the backside on the Hexagon Pop Up cards I've made in the past rather plain, only adding my greeting or sentiment to the center panel, but this time I felt compelled to decorate the backside as well. I added a paper pieced bamboo and panda to try to give the card a 360 degree view, just like the Hallmark Wonderfold cards.

Ahhh! And for me the coolest thing about this card is how it easily folds flat when the two side corners of the box are gently squeezed. Yay! New fun card style to play with!

Simple Hexagonal Base Pop Up and Panda Thank You

Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to get together with crafty friends to play and share ideas. For my share, I chose to do a Make and Take of the fun Hexagonal Base Pop Up card that I learned from Jay Soriano of Mitosu Crafts via his You Tube tutorial. Jay uses Stampin' Up's Sizzix Window Box Thinlits die to create the base of his card. For my version, I started with Jay's template here and used Make the Cut to create one similar, but with the front panel slightly shorter than the rest.

With unicorns becoming so wildly popular lately, I decided to go with this cute Unicorn freebie image found at Free Pretty Things For You. The rainbow and clouds image I used for the background was also part of this freebie set. Both were created into elements for my card using the print and cut function in Make the Cut design program.

Here's the view from the top of the card where you can see how the card is constructed on the inside with a main center panel. For my center panel I used a piece of glitter cardstock with the top cut to look like a puffy cloud. The unicorn was then adhered to a pop up style box which was glued to both the center panel and the floor of the the hexagon. I used foam tape to adhere the rainbow to the center cloud panel. Tiny glittery pink stars were also added with some foam tape.

Pushing down on the main center panel collapses the card and allows it to flatten so it can be slipped into an envelope. Definitely one of my new favorite cards to make!

Also want to share this super cute thank you card I received from my dear friend Dale. Awwww... isn't panda just too adorable? I think panda was paper pieced from a Frantic Stamper die and pretty bamboo background from a Cheery Lynn die. I love just about anything panda... gonna have to add this one to my collection too!

Aloha and Welcome to Hawaii!

Decorated a dozen french fry boxes and filled them with cookies for a family luncheon we held while our granddaughter and her parents were here this summer. Since everything was unplanned and decided just in the spur of the moment, these cookie holders had to be super quick to put together.

The cutting file template for the fry boxes came from SVG Cutting Files. I wanted to do a Hawaiian theme so I chose a coloring book image of  Hello Kitty doing the hula to render into a cut file to decorate the boxes.  Hello Kitty is always cute and yet so easy to paper piece so she was a perfect choice.  The flowers for her lei were cut using a Punch Bunch mini flower punch. I  really had fun putting this together and am totally looking forward to crafting lots more fun cutesy things for our granddaughter as she grows up!