Sending Big Hugs

 No matter how many times I keep telling myself not to buy any more stamps, it seems every year when Mama Elephant announces their Anniversary Sale, I cave in. This year was no different; I just couldn't resist picking up this "Little Girl Agenda" set, especially since these adorable little girls reminded me so much of our granddaughter. When they arrived in the mail, I could hardly wait to ink them up to create my very first Slimline card.

This was my first set of Mama Elephant "Little Agenda" stamps and I was a little surprised at how tiny the images were in real life. At first I thought I'd surely need a magnifying glass to color these, but it actually wasn't too bad. The nice thing is they hardly use any ink at all and color up super quick!

Cutting them out was a little tricky, though... now I understand the reason behind the coordinating dies for these stamps! After cutting, I mounted the little girls onto square panels that I had lightly colored with Tim Holtz distress oxide inks.

Rounded rectangle shapes in Make the Cut design program were used to create the four window Slimline card front, and Arial Black font was used to for the alphas for "hugs". I cut four sets and stacked them to give it some chipboard-like dimension.

And on the inside, a simple message completes my card to accompany a surprise box of goodies sent to our sweet granddaughter.

"PANDAstic" Birthday

My card today is a variation of the Double Z-Fold style card I created for my mother in law's birthday in my last post. The inspiration for this one comes from the very talented Bronwyn Eastley, who designs and shares some of the most amazing and fun Double Z-Fold cards on her blog, Addinktive Designs.
 

I believe Bronwyn calls her card a "Double Pop Up Gatefold Box" card, but I will simply refer to this as a variation of a Double Z fold card since its easier for me to remember.

As you can see from this view from the top,  the double z-folds create two "boxes" into which struts and pop up boxes can be added.

I added a strut to the inside of the first "box" and used a strip of clear acetate to adhere a panda with balloons to make him appear to be suspended in the air by his balloons.

A simple pop up box mechanism was glued into the "box" created by the second z fold, where I added a panda with a birthday cake. Paper pieced pandas, cake and gifts are from Marjorie Ann Designs "Panda Love" and "Birthday Girl" cutting files. Stitched balloons were cut using Craft Emporium's "Balloon Galore" die set, and an Elizabeth Craft Designs' die was used to cut the "Happy Birthday" sentiment.

I added my sentiment to the back panel. I really enjoyed putting together this variation of the double Z-fold card and am looking forward to trying another one very soon. This card is almost 15 inches long when stretched open and offers plenty of space to add lots of fun images and embellishments. I was in quite a rush to finish this card in time for our dear friend's birthday, and I see now that my finished card looks a little bare. I probably could have added more pandas, balloon, presents, and maybe some stars and confetti to fill it in and give it a more festive look.

Lantern Birthday Card

 Today's card is one I recently created for my mother in law's birthday. I knew I wanted to go with an Asian theme so I pulled out some of the Spellbinders Destination China dies I had purchased a while ago, together with all shades and textures of red and gold papers and cardstock I could find in my stash.

I really love the intricate dies in Spellbinder's Destination China collection, and although I have used the Traditional Fence dies often, this was the first time I used the Lantern set. I wanted to try to include all of the Chinese lanterns in the set on my card, but knew my card would have to be rather large to accommodate all three lanterns. 

After a little experimenting, I realized that a Double Z style card could be sized perfectly to fit all three of the beautiful lanterns. I used Stardream gold cardstock to cut the borders, the Chinese character "Shou" (for longevity) and the Traditional Fence panel. "Happy Birthday" was cut from an Elizabeth Craft Designs die.

Lanterns were die cut from metallic gold cardstock and backed with pearlescent red Stardream jupiter text weight paper. Red glitter cardstock was adhered behind the gold Traditional Fence panel.

The first lantern was attached to the front panel, and the remaining two lanterns were adhered to strips of clear acetate and "hung" on the struts inside the "box" of the Double Z card.

I found room on the back panel to add our sentiment and birthday wishes. I really enjoyed  playing  and experimenting with re-sizing the Double Z style card to meet my specific needs. Sometimes you can come up with some interesting variations just by increasing or decreasing the height or width of  a card template by half an inch or more.

What a CAT-astrophe!

 After making the masked Daniel Tiger card to send to our granddaughter (in my previous post), I wanted to create something similar to send smiles to some friends whom I've missed getting together and spending time with this year. 

I came across some handmade cards on Pinterest using  a clever play on the word "catastrophe". Then of course my favorite cat, Hello Kitty came to mind and I figured together this might be a cute idea for a card.

Just as with my last card, I used  a cutting file for the mask from the "Shelter In Place" file from Little Scraps of Heaven, sizing it to fit Miss Hello Kitty, then welding it into a round window for the front of the card.       

Cutting file for paper pieced Hello Kitty was created in Make the Cut design program from a coloring book image. 

Cutting files for the thermometer and caution tape as well as the printed virus image in the speech bubble are also from Little Scraps of Heaven's "Shelter In Place" file.  An icon symbol of a pump bottle found on the internet was rendered into a cut file to create the antibacterial bottle.

Just learned recently that we need to be sheltering in place for at least another two weeks in our area. I'll be mailing half a dozen of these cards to friends this week, hoping it might help to bring a little bit of cheer...

Staying Safe With Daniel

Yikes! Our city and county is back on lock down due to a  recent rise in our Covid 19 positive cases. All of this was getting a little depressing so I decided to cheer myself up by making this fun card; hoping it would also bring a smile to our little 3 year old granddaughter whom we're really missing a lot these days.
 

The idea for my card comes from some of the cute and clever pandemic greeting cards I've been seeing a lot of on the internet recently which feature a masked happy face. Since this card was to be for our granddaughter, I swapped the happy face with a face that I knew would be more familiar to a preschooler... can you guess who it is?

Open the card to see the face behind the mask is none other than PBS Kids' Daniel Tiger! In case you're not familiar with him, he's the same Daniel Tiger that appeared as a puppet in PBS's Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.  He and all the rest of the puppets (and even the red trolley!) from that program are back on PBS as a delightful animated cartoon for children with all the wonderful songs from the original show. 

The paper pieced cutting file for Daniel was created in Make the Cut design program using a coloring book image found on the PBS Kids website. For the front of the card, I used the mask from Little Scraps of Heaven Shelter In Place cutting file, which was welded into the round window shape.

Grassy border was cut using a Die-namics die and flowers and leaves were cut using Punch Bunch mini punches.

We've heard our granddaughter isn't always cooperative with her parents about wearing a mask to keep safe, but perhaps her favorite Daniel Tiger can be more compelling?

Hello Kitty Eye Chart Card

 I made this card for a special young lady in our family who will be leaving home in a few weeks to attend Optometry School in Arizona. To create the custom eye chart for my card, I used the free eye chart maker app available online at the Homemade Gifts Made Easy website. So easy... all you need to do is type in the text you want on your eye chart, select a font and it's ready to download and print in a matter of seconds.

The soon to be Optometry student is my cousin's daughter, who happens to be a big fan of Hello Kitty, so of course I had to add a "geeky" Hello Kitty to her card. I also found some Bo Bunny Ruled Journal Paper cardstock in my stash which I thought would be perfect backdrop for this "back to school" card.

Decided to make this into a fun Surprise Pop Up Slider style card... pulling up on the tulle bow on the top of the card makes the front panel pull up like an easel, revealing our sentiment underneath.

I also adhered a clear envelope with a monetary gift onto the pull tab as an added surprise. The video tutorial for putting together a Surprise Pop Up Slider style card by Splitcoast Stampers' Beate Johns can be viewed on You Tube, here. 

I always enjoy making the Surprise Pop Up Slider card, especially whenever I want to enclose a gift card or monetary gift with a fun interactive card. 

Kokeshi Double Slider Card

I recently discovered that Lili of the Valley, an online stamp shop from UK, also has an Etsy Shop by the same name where they sell their line of digital stamps. I've always known Lili of the Valley to have some of the cutest stamp images so I was excited to be able to purchase them in digital format. I noticed they had some adorable Asian inspired stamps, and  picked up their Kokeshi Doll Set  knowing it would be perfect to use on a double slider birthday card I had in mind for a sweet friend.

Still photos never seem to do slider style cards justice, so hubby agreed to help me capture some of the sllider fun of this card on video.

Pull out on the tab on the bottom right side of the card and the two kokeshi girl images slide from behind the sakura border and towards each other to meet in the center! To create this fun interactive slider, I followed MFT's very talented Karolyn Loncon's video tutorial for a double slider card found here. Karolyn uses MFT Die-namics dies to make it easier to create the mechanism to make this slider card work but you could also cut the slider pieces and create the slots with an x-acto blade.

Kokeshi girl digital images were printed onto white cardstock and colored with Copic markers. The sakura images that came with the set were rendered into a cutting file in Make the Cut, cut from pearlescent and glitter cardstock, then paper pieced to be a border. The blue wave background panel is from a digital paper set designed by Gradient Fox also on Etsy. I used Memo and Ballerina true type fonts for the sentiments and cut the front and back panels and the sentiment using the Print and Cut function.

I enjoyed putting this card together and was especially pleased that I was able to assemble and have the double slider mechanism working smoothly fairly easily. Looking forward to trying another double slider card like this one soon!