I have found that if I am stressed out the best thing to help me relax is to jump into a project. And if I can't get home to my art room? I create in my head....I have assembled so many cards in my head that if I could have actually been making them I could open my own card store lol
I thought that I hadn't really had time to make anything over the last 2 weeks and yet when I downloaded my pictures I found out that I had been busy after all....yay me! And yay you if you like seeing what I have been making. :-)
Hubby wants to start decorating for Halloween so I knew I needed to get this little gem made before he started so I would be sure to have a place to display it.
This is haunted housed from the Elmhurst Hollow set at SVG Cuts. It is 8 1/4" tall including the little points on top. It looks really complex and yet I put it together in just a couple hours (that is including picking the papers which is always the hardest part!)
It is assembled in 3 sections and has openings in the back so you can add battery operated tea lights.
You can see in the photo that I added embossing to the chimney and window boards.
I also rubbed distress inks over all the corners and edges to give it more of a dark look but that doesn't really seem to show up much in the pictures.
A couple weeks ago my friend Helen told me if I made one of the SVG Cuts haunted houses that she wanted to see the ghost of a woman peering out of one of the windows.
I stamped this Stamp Clinic image of a Victorian era cleaning woman, on the back of the vellum, using ink that was almost the exact same peachy color as my vellum. When the house is not lit it is very difficult to see her. She really shows up when the candles are glowing....just as any good ghost should. :-)
I think I am becoming addicted to SVG Cuts designs. They are just soooo cool!
This box card is from their latest set Autumn Box Cards. It can be an invitation, place card, greeting card or just a cute decoration. And the file comes with an envelope for mailing this gorgeous card!
I love all the little details like the trim on the plate and pitcher, the layers on the pumpkins, even the battenburg lace on the sides!
I embossed the top layer of the pumpkins slightly so they would have a bit of roundedness (is that even a word? lol) and look a little more 3D.
I had so much fun digging through my papers for this one as these are some of my favorite colors to craft with. :-D
I told you I actually made stuff these past two weeks! lol
I found a couple glass blocks at a yard sale this past summer. $1 each! I couldn't pass them up....but also couldn't decide on what I wanted to put on them. (one of them is still sitting in the garage waiting for inspiration)
I finally decided I wanted to create a fall scene on one so that I could leave it out from September through November.
I frosted the front and back panels using Amour Etch so that the lights wouldn't be glaring when I turned it on.
Here it is unlit so that you can see the details.
The tree is from the October 31st cartridge. I think that is probably the coolest tree image I have! I just love it!!!
The fence, which is actually 2 of the image welded together, is from Happy Hauntings.
The pumpkin comes from Close To My Heart Artbooking.
And the leaves are from Disney Mickey and Friends, Disney Dreams Come True and Close To My Heart Artiste.
I had originally planned to use colored vinyl so that it would look colorful when not lit but went for the silhouette effect instead as I think it is more striking.
And here it is lit with orange mini lights.
Notice the diffused light because of the frosting. It creates a soft glow in the corner of my living room.
I have other blocks I use at Christmas that we have to put in strange places because the glare is so annoying. Guess what I will be doing once I unpack all the Christmas stuff this year?! lol
And lastly, I finally got a chance to try out my new Close To My Heart Artfully Sent cartridge.
It was just released a couple weeks ago. It is totally geared toward card making so if that is what you like to do, you should check it out.
It has the bases for 5 different card types, Scenes, Pop-ups, Sentiments (which is what the one above is), Sleeve and Pocket cards.
And they are so versatile! My card originally said "Dream" and it was cut out of the base piece. I removed that and had the Explore 'write' Happy Thanksgiving. BTW this card is made with only 2 pieces of paper. The red is red on the front and brown on the back. The little frame is cut from the red piece and how you fold it creates the brown frame. Then you have the cream inside panel with the writing. It is very cool and yet goes together in just a couple minutes.
If you are interested in this cartridge you can check out the link above or click here.
The kit includes the cartridge with over 700 images, 3 exclusive coordinating stamp sets and a full package of White Daisy cardstock!
Happy Crafting!
I am loving these chilly nights. The temperatures dipping down into the low 50s. Windows open all night. Burrowing down into the blankets and feeling all warm and snuggly. Struggling to make yourself climb out of your warm cocoon every morning to go to work.
But what is up with it going clear up into triple digits in the day time?!!!
I love fall! It is my favorite season. But it needs to just get here already!!! I do not like how Mother Nature toys with us. Teasing us with these lovely, cool nights just to harass us with these sweltering days.
But I guess I should stop and savor what we have because soon it will be winter and we will all be begging for this hot days again. lol
I really did pop on here today to share my latest project (not just to complain about the weather haha)
If you have been here before you know that I just recently began making 3D projects with my Cricut. I bought my first Cricut in 2007....what on earth took me soooooo long to get into 3D??? Well I will tell you.....the projects just look very intimidating! But it turns out they really aren't!. Wish someone had told me that years ago! lol
And do you know which projects look the MOST intimidating? The ones from SVG Cuts! They have these amazing houses and boxes and teapots and typewriters and ... You look at them and your brain says No Way! How on earth do you take simple cardstock and turn it into THAT???
Well they had a big sale for Labor Day and since I had just started 3D and found out that it wasn't as tough as I thought, I took the plunge and bought a few of their kits.
I took yesterday off from work (no not just to play although that is what I ended up doing all day lol) and decided it was time to start a project from one of the sets I had purchased. :-)
I wanted to make something fairly simple since I wasn't sure how easy their pieces might go together and didn't want to waste paper (cause with my lifetime stash heaven forbid I waste a sheet or two! lol)
I picked the Keeper's House from the Seaside set. You can view it here. Hubby and I love lighthouses so that was a natural choice for one of the sets I bought. But I also saw so much potential for the house for any season or holiday.
Today it is no longer a Keeper's House but an Autumn Cottage.
I dove into my stash and found some warm colored papers and cardstocks (that took about an hour! lol) I then loaded my mats and cut everything out and assembled the pieces. I did take about a 20 minute break at some point but from start (picking papers) to finish I think it only took me about 2 1/2 hours. I was not rushing, I had the video on to be sure I was doing things correctly. And it went together even easier than I expected.
Oh, did you know that SVG Cuts has videos showing you step by step how to assemble their projects? How cool is that?!
So here is my house.
Cute isn't it? No clue where the papers came from. I haven't bought printed cardstock in years and then usually from the clearance section after every season lol
But you know I couldn't stop at this point. Now comes the really fun part! Embellishing!!!!!
I added a climbing vines adorned with red, orange and yellow roses. The vines are from the free Creativebug files on Design Space. I had never even heard of it before! But it popped up on my search for vines so either it has always been there and I never noticed or is just free for the week. Either way it was exactly what I needed. The roses are from Flower Shoppe.
And of course I added pumpkins. The left one is from Disney's Happily Ever After. The one on the right comes from Close To My Heart Artbooking.
Tucker always loved pumpkins so I thought he would like to be included. The cat image is from the Pet Shop cartridge and I colored it to look like Tucker using Prismacolor pencils.
The fence corners are from Picturesque. I think next time I will make them slightly bigger.
The door knob is a brad from BoBunny from the Bugs & Hisses ICandy brads set that I bought at least 5 years ago....probably more lol
This is the left side of the house. Kitty insisted that if I included Tucker that he wanted to be there too. :-)
He is also from the Pet Shop cartridge.
His set of 3 pumpkins is a single image from the Pooh and Friends cartridge.
Here is the right side....and of course Minnie said "Me too" lol
She comes from the Meow cartridge and her pumpkin is from the Thanksgiving cartridge (minus the vines that come on that image).
And finally the back. I think I need something more on the wall but haven't decided what yet. Maybe a window frame? Just to fill the blank space.
Again, more of the pumpkins used on the other sides.
And a tree from Create a Critter. I scored the trunk and folded it so that the tree could be glued to the corner of the house. I think I should have done some shading on the large leaf mass (I did shade the individual leaves but it doesn't show very well in the photo) but I like the effect of the tree on the corner.
Here is a close-up of a couple of my pumpkins. I shade them first with Prismacolor pencils. I then score the lines in the pumpkin from the front using a small stylus. I then flip them over and emboss them with a larger stylus to give them a rounded, 3D effect.
Here is a close-up of Tucker. I still miss that little guy. Smartest little cat I ever met and the best friend I ever had.
Here is Kitty. He really has 1 yellow and one gold eye and is a big fluff ball lol
He is almost 19 years old and still going strong. :-)
And my baby girl, Minnie. She poses like this when she wants to be petted....up on tip-toes, back arched. Cracks me up every time. :-)
For some reason I forgot to paint her white chin and chest....oops. Sorry Minnie.
And finally, another cool feature. Because this is a box (the roof lifts off) you can put in a battery operated tea light! Isn't that awesome? I had it lit all evening and the lights flickered softly in the windows made me wish I lived there all warm and cozy and ready for fall. :-)
Thank you for stopping by and if you made it this far....I'm sorry. I sure was extremely wording this week wasn't I? LOL
Have a wonderful, craft filled week! :-)
Now that I have discovered the world of 3D I can't seem to stop!
I struggled with my pumpkin/Jack o Lantern last week so I figured I would try something easier.
This sweet piece of cake comes from the Sweet Tooth boxes cartridge. I ran the icing through my Cuttlebug to give it more of that swirled frosting look. I then embellished it with some flowers cut from the Flower Shoppe cart and some lace and ribbon scraps.
It went together really easy (thank goodness since I had already had enough issues with the pumpkin lol)
But of course, I can't stick to the simple, straight-forward for long lol
I found a box on the CTMH Artiste cartridge. I would say it resembles a mailbox you would find attached to a house....does that make sense? The kind that are rectangle and the top lifts up like a flap.
Ok, I gave up and went and took a picture of it from the assembly manual lol
Anyway, I saw it and thought.....house....selling pumpkins. Yeah, kind of scary how my mind works lol
I had a blast designing this project and had to keep reining myself in otherwise I would have had this thing covered with all kinds of goodies inside and out lol
My plan is to put a little battery operated tea light inside (if I can find someplace in town that sells them!)
So, the basic shape is the above box from Artiste. I then added a door, windows and sign from Sweet Tooth boxes. I welded the window panes to the box base to that the Explore would cut them out. The roof scallops are from Elegant Edges. The tree comes from Pooh and Friends and I pounced on some orange, red and yellow paints to give dimension. The pumpkins are from Happily Ever After. They are plain with no detail at all other than the stems so I drew on lines, shaded with colored pencils and then burnished them from the back to give them a rounded puffiness. The written panel is a rectangle from CTMH Art Philosophy because I wanted the rounded corners. I let the Explore do the writing using the Simple Celebrations font.
There are windows on all four sides and some pumpkins on the back. :-)
Lastly I ran some jute through the holes in the top and tied it closed.
I love out it turned out! I can't wait to start decorating for fall and this will definitely go up on my mantel :-)
Where has all the time gone? It seems like I just posted something here yesterday and yet the last time I was here was August 24.
That doesn't mean I haven't been working on anything. As a matter of fact, this post is very picture heavy (just a warning lol)
I am still in my Fall/Halloween mood. I just love the colors!!! But I have a couple other, non-autumn related items this week too. :-)
To say I have been working on tons of stuff is an understatement. I even have a few things still on my camera.
Let's start with fun new ideas...
I saw this on Pinterest while looking for some Cuttlebug ideas. Using aluminum tape, you can created really cool backgrounds. I found this 50 foot roll of tape in with the duct work supplies at Home Depot. It cost around $8. I already have a great idea for my Christmas cards using this for the background (hope it turns out as great as I imagine lol)
I found that if I put the tape onto cardstock first, it was much more stable and easier to work with on my cards (but you can run just the tape through the Cuttlebug and it embosses just fine). I used plain index cards for the backing....cheap and an easy size to work with.
You can see that I was also playing with alcohol inks. :-) I found that you can apply the alcohol inks before embossing like above or apply after embossing to just highlight the raised areas (but this was much more time consuming....still looks cool though)
So, after experimenting, I was ready to use this on a card. I put 2 strips of the aluminum tape onto an index card. I covered it with alcohol inks (a blend of reds, browns and golds...which don't show up too well in a photo because it is so shiny) then ran it through the Cuttlebug using the Fall Leaf background from Darice. The stamped image is from the Stampin' Up set Halloween Smiles.
And while playing around with the Cuttlebug, I pulled out my Jack o Lantern folder (part of the Happy Hauntings set) and tried applying ink to the embossed images.
I love how it turned out. This is Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink. I just rubbed the ink pad gently over the paper so the ink only hit the raised images. My only problem? I is just too bright and busy to work as a background with anything I have tried. So it is sitting in my stack of leftovers until I find a good match.
I used this folder again to make the background for a friend's birthday card (she is a Halloween baby)
I made the cupcake in fall colors and of course, chocolate icing lol The cupcake comes from Simply Charmed. I added shading with Prismacolor pencils.
And since I was still in Halloween mode, I pulled out the Teddy Bear Parade cartridge and made this little witch.
But then I couldn't decide what to do with her so she hung out on my desk until I put her on this doorknob tag. The spider web and 'Trick or Treat' are from October 31st.
But we are not done yet my friends.....I warned you that I was super busy! lol
I saw several ideas for Post-it note holders online and thought that might make a cute gift. I grabbed my Create a Critter and Teddy Bear Parade. I removed the eyes and mouth cuts from the worm using the Cricut Craft Room and resized him just a bit to fit my project better. His glasses are from Teddy Bear Parade, resized to fit his little head.
This paper was printed with the eyelet and striped edge. Since this was a practice project, I didn't want to get into layering papers and such. I just wanted to get my basic measurements down.
I used the standard 3x3 post-it. I cut the background paper at 3 1/4" x 6 3/4" so that I have about 1/8" edge around the post-it. It went together really fast. I think I might be tossing a few of these into my Christmas boxes. :-)
I was able to leave the Cricut and Cuttlebug alone for a while this week :-)
I moved into tag mode.
This is what happens when I am bored and start watching Tim Holtz videos lol Using the technique where you rub your distress inks onto a non-stick craft sheet (or in my case a piece of foil) spritz with water and then rub your tag into the puddles....I got this.
The bumpy stuff down the right side is some sort of gel medium with glass beads in it. The stuff was so old that it had thickened to a very stiff mess but I rubbed some on...this was as smooth as I could get it....before I dipped the tag in inks. I had also added a couple lines with crayon knowing they would resist the ink.
I used some stencils and rubber stamps to add more visual texture (notice blue blotches in the upper left...giraffe spots I think. And faint trees in the center left)
This sat on my desk for a couple days until I added more images and added it to my art journal.
But this was not the only tag I inked up that day! I actually did 5 or 6. Some have not yet been used. Others on waiting to be downloaded off the camera. :-)
I did manage to get one of them photographed AND downloaded lol
Again, using Distress Inks for the background, I added lots of stamped images. The birds and clock face are from Tim Holtz. The pumpkin is from Inkadinkado and the tree branch is actually just one branch from a very large tree stamp from Stampa Rosa.
I added eyelets and jute to the bottom left. The stars are brads. They were shiny silver and copper but I inked them with alcohol inks to make them dark.
Don't you love how it 'glows'? That is the Distress Inks and the Prismacolor pencils in his eyes. They are both products with rich, intense colors.
I guess I have bombarded you with enough this week! lol
Stay tuned for more of my Fall/Halloween goodness! Be forewarned, I am trying to put together an Autumn Junk Journal lol
Happy Fall Y'all
Summer has to be my least favorite season. Yes, we have flowers but they come with pollen! And we have vegetable gardens, which I love, but they are a lot of work and mine did not grow well at all this year. And the heat! Yuk!
I am an Autumn person. I love the weather, the colors and the PUMPKINS! I am anxiously awaiting fall!!! :-)
I didn't have a whole lot of crafting time this week but what I did have I made the most of...
Last Saturday evening, while hubby was grilling dinner, I wanted to see if I could whip up a little something.
I grabbed my Simply Charmed cartridge and some scrap paper and made this little guy. He is cut at 2 1/2 inches and shaded with chalks.
And since hubby wasn't quite ready to serve dinner, I headed back into my play art room and made him a tag to live on. This was cut from Tags, Bags, Boxes and More at 3 1/2 inches and 'aged' with distress inks. I typed up the text with Word and cut it with decorative scissors.
Isn't he cute? I am thinking I might send it to my mom to use as a bookmark as she randomly tells me she is craving a cupcake.....although looking at one all the time might not help that problem lol
Sunday morning as hubby was cooking breakfast (no he doesn't do all the cooking lol) I stamped this fellow from the Happy Fall Y'all Stampin' Up set, colored him with Prismacolor pencils and then inked up the 6" tag with distress inks.
I had to wait until later in the week before I had time to work on this again.
I ran the tag through my Cuttlebug using Tim Holtz Texture Fades folder called Sheet Music. I then rubbed distress ink on the embossing to make it show up more. And finally mounted the tag on some paper that looked like peeling paint.
A couple days later I headed back to my Cricut. :-) I was in the mood to make an ATC. I used Create a Critter for the adorable panda and stamped the bamboo with a stamp from VivaLasVegas Stamps.
And finally, this morning, I made my Thanksgiving cards! I told you I made the most of what little time I had lol
This dapper turkey also comes from the Create A Critter cartridge cut at 2 inches. He is shaded with chalks and mounted on a background that I embossed with Cuttlebug's Autumn Type folder. The 'gobble' was resized a bit in the Cricut Craft Room before cutting.
Just another little project that I threw together one evening.....Hubby saw me browsing through the Teddy Bear Parade leaflet and thought I needed to make a bear with a camera. There is a bear on that cartridge that has a camera but he is dressed for a Hawaiian vacation. I mixed and matched the clothes (a great feature about this cartridge), switching out his shirt for a plain one, adding a baseball cap and glasses. Now he looks just like my hubby....who collects and restores vintage cameras and is NEVER seen without a baseball cap lol
I hope you all have a wonderful week!
I am already thinking about Christmas cards!!!! And Pumpkins! lol
