Sympathy Card

I needed to make a card for a co-worker who lost a family member.  This is what I came up, I love how it turned out. 



The card was made by using an 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper folded in half.  I needed to make it large enough for several people to sign on the inside.  The flowers were made by using a method I learned from watching two different videos.  One video was at Penny Duncan Creations, just follow this link   http://pennyduncancreations.blogspot.com/2010/12/merry-christmasand-hydrangia.html.  She is truly amazing, while you are there spend some time looking at all of her other wonderful creations, you will  just be blown away at her talent.  The other video was from Paper Wishes Weekly Webisode at this link http://www.paperwishes.com/webisodes/index.php?page=high&id=368.  You can get a free cut file from Penny Duncan or Paper Wishes will sell you punches to make the flowers.  I happened to find a punch on clearance and was able to us it to create my flowers.  For the base of my flowers, I just used a 1 inch styrofoam ball that I cut in half with a sharp knife.



For the flower petals, I used purple paper.  What ever color you choose, make sure to use paper that is colored on both sides as you will see the bottom side of the paper when the flowers are attached to the styrofoam ball.  I also edged each petal with purple ink.  In the center of each little flower I used purple stickles to give it a little bling.  The little bit of bling from the stickles really makes a big difference.  The leaves were made using the cut file from Penny Duncan at the link above.  I did use some brown chalk to draw the veins in each leaf.  The flower stems were just some I purchased at Michals just as the purple ribbon that I tied around the stems.  I also purchased a cross charm to tie to the flowers with the ribbon.

The background paper is just white paper that I ran through my embosser using my polka dots folder, then I inked over the page with more purple ink to make the dots show up.  It was cut at 5 X 6 1/2.  I added a small piece of paper cut at 5 X 1 1/2 inch to the bottom and stamped "With Sympathy" on the lower right hand corner.   You can also print your sentiment onto archival paper and cut it to fit the size card that you decide to make, that is how I did the sentiment on the inside of the card.  I also inked around the edge of that paper after triming it to fit the card.

Because this card will not fit into an envelope, I made a box to put it in.  To make the box I cut a piece of sturdy cardstock the size of 11 X 8 and scored it 1 inch, then kept rotating the cardstock on the scorer and scoring at 1 inch on all four sides of the paper.  At each corner you will need to make a cut from the edge along one score line and in as far as the first score line you are cutting towards, make sure to only cut once at each corner.  You don't want to remove the little square piece that is 1 in. X 1 in, you will need to fold this little piece in, add some tape to the back side and adhere it to the opposing section of the card stock forming one corner.  Do this at each corner and  you will have created the bottom of the box.  The top is created the same way but you will need a smaller piece of cardstock cut at 10 X 7, scoring at 1/2 inch in on each side, follow the same instructions as you did to create the bottom of the box and you will have a top that fits the bottom.  I hope this isn't to confusing, if you need additional instructions, please let me know.   I added some ribbon to the top of the box for decorations and inked the inside of the bottom half of the box so it wouldn't look so plain. 

I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know if you have any questions.  I would love to hear your comments.



My Airplane Page

Here is another page from our Disney World trip.  This is the page where I show the pictures of us on our plane ride to Florida.  I wanted this page to look like the outside of a plane and used silver paper then added eyelets to make it look like rivets on a real plane.  The line in the middle is just drawn with a black pin.  The white piece of paper at the top left is just a copy of our itinerary that I shrunk down and printed out.  I made the clouds with cotton balls that I stretched out.  The "musical notes" are from a musical note punch, but I substituted the dots on each note for a Mickey Mouse head, also from a punch that I have.  You can see a close up picture below.

If you look closely at the top of the page you will see tabs.  By pulling on them you can see that the "window shade" of the plane raises revealing who is sitting in the seat.  To create this, I had to use a lot of pop dots to raise the silver paper above a base 12 X 12 paper and created a track for the shades to slide up and down on.  I wish I had taken pictures as I was putting this page together so you could see the tracks I created, but to be honest, I wasn't sure if my idea would even work and I had planned.

If you want to do a page similar to this, here are a few points to keep in mind.  You need to mount the pictures on the page low enough to allow the full lenth of the "shade" to pull up and show the full picture.  The tab needs to be long enough to allow the shade to go down over the full picture.  I made the tab out of a double layer of silver card stock to make it more sturdy and able to handle the pulling that is sure to happen on such a fun page!  The next time I make something like this, I would probably try putting popsicle sticks between the layers of the tab to make it even more sturdy, not sure what issues that might cause though.

Below is a picture of both window shades open, you can see me and the family in our seats on the plane.

Here is a close up of the itinerary that I put on the page.  I wanted to show the dates and times of our flights.

This is a close up of the musical notes I created.  I hand cut the staff lines, maybe the next time I would just draw them so they would all be the same thickness.

Below is a close up of the silver eyelets that I used to look like rivets.

This was another fun page to create.

I hope you enjoyed it.  Let me know if you have any questions.  Thanks for stopping by.

Cruise Book Cover

For our 10th Wedding Anniversay my DH and I got to go on a cruise (without our children!). I made a scrapbook of our trip, here is a picture of the outside of the album. I was able to find a scrapbook with a shadow box on the front.  Unfortunately the picture does not demonstrate the dimensions you get by using a  shadow box to create this.

It is really hard to tell from this picture, but the "water" is made from toothpaste!  I know what you are thinking, and no, that is not a typo, I really made it from toothpaste.  I put gel toothpaste (it has to be gel toothpaste, the regular toothpaste does not look like water) in a ziplock bag and put it in the shadowbox.  To be honest with you, I have no idea how this will hold up over time.  I can say that I created this at least 3 years ago and it is still fine.  The picture I used was not the original, just incase the ziplock bag began to leak, so I took a copy of a picture from the cruise and turned it into a black and white copy.  The ship was just a sticker I purchase awhile ago, the clouds are from cotton balls and the moon is a circle that I cut from scrap yellow paper and inked to make it look like a cloudy night moon.

Travel Packet

I have a great friend who recently went on a cruise, so for her birthday I made a book for her to organize all of her travel documents.  This is the front of the book, I used cereal boxes to make the pages and covered them with paper from a beach themed packet that I purchased at a Big Lots store a long time ago.

I wanted to make the book a size that would easily fit into a purse or would be easy to store in a small carry on.

When you open the book you will see the section where you can store airline tickets, your passport books and a small section to store a passport card which is an optional item to purchase when you order a passport and is the size of a credit card.

On the last page I created a section to store note cards where you can jot down things you did or saw for each day.  This is great for scrapbookers who want to make sure and journal the trip correctly when they are ready to scrapbook the event.  I even made special color coordinated paper to journal on.

I bound it using my Bind-it-All machine.  The project was much easier to complete by having a color coordinated packet of paper instead of having to pick out matching papers from my supply.

I hope you enjoyed it and thanks for stopping by!

Victorian Birthday Card

This is a card I made for someone who loves purple and who lives in an old Victorian style house.  I used the Heritage cartridge from provo craft and chose the hat design.  I cut it at 3 1/2 on black cardstock.  The background paper was cut at 5 1/4 X 4, the paper that I used was double sided, so I cut 1 1/2 inches off of the bottom and turned it over to have a matching design on the bottom portion which I stamped Happy Birthday on.  I wrapped the ribbon around it before placing it on the card.

I mounted the hat and added flowers to it using glitter.  I also added glitter to the ribbon of the hat.  I did not mount the hat on pop dots because I wanted the glitter flowers to come off of the hat onto the background paper. 

I hope you enjoyed this, let me know if you have any questions,

Hello Kitty Birthday Card

This is a birthday card I made using my Hello Kitty cartridge from Provo Craft.  I will no longer buy any Cricut cartridges because I dislike what Provo Craft has done to the makers of Make the Cut and Sure Cuts A Lot, but I will use the ones I currently have as long as possible.

I cut Kitty at 3 inches, but that size does make some pieces very small and hard to work with.  I actually got frustrated with the small pieces for the center of the two flowers and just used glitter instead of the small dots that were part of the cut.

The letters were cut at 1 and 1/2 on pink paper with pink polka dots.  I do like the font because it was easy to work with at such a small size.  The background for the letters was cut using the shadow feature of the same size, I just used brown ink pad to ink around the edges.

The card itself was made using and 81/2 X 11 inch size of white card stock which I cut in half to make two pieces 8 1/2 X 5 1/2.  I scored that in the middle length ways at 4 1/4 and folded it in half.  The piece of green background paper was cut at 4 inches by 5 1/4.  I attached a ribbon to it prior to placing on the white folded cardstock paper, then placed my Hello Kitty and Happy Birthday sentiment on it.  I did use pop dots on Kitty to make her pop off the card.

One thing I have found out while making cards is that it takes the most time coming up with the design, the paper colors and ribbon color to use for each card, so when I decide on a combination of these items for a card it is very little extra effort to make two or four of the same design and put aside for another birthday.

Organizing My Travel Documents

Here are a few pics of the folder I created to organize our travel documents for our upcoming cruise.

I took two Vera Bradley folders that someone gave me and placed one inside the other.  I then bound them with my Zutter and created a flap out of blue and brown cardstock and used velcroe as a way of closing the folder.

Here is the flap opened.

Here is the inside.  The right side is actually the front of folder number two so I had to create a pocket out of brown cardstock.

This is the center of the inside folder.  The labels came with the folders I just printed titles on each label by running them through my printer.

This was the fun page.  I had to create four pockets for our passports to fit into.  I also had to create flaps to hold the passports into place.  That would ruin a trip if we lost a passport!  The flaps were made much like the flap to hold the organizer closed. I used matching brads as decorations also.

This is a picture of a flap opened.  The right side of the page is just clear self adhesive pockets that I normally use to slide a gift card into when I make a birthday card etc.  If you look you can see a small blue strip down the right side near the brown flap.  The blue paper was used to cover up the ugly side of the brads used to attach the closing flap.

Here is the back side showing the two brads that I attached the closing flap to