Halloween Themed Birthday Card

Well, hello there! How have you been? Good I hope! Do you know where the last several weeks have gone? I seem to have blown right through them and November is right around the corner. It was not intentional to have seemingly disappeared, but I managed to, didn’t I?

I’ve been helping out at school.

Need I say more? LOL

Now that we are at the end of October and we just had our Trunk or Treat on Friday evening, the volunteer commitments should ease off a bit.  Jessica had her 9th birthday in amongst all this too!

She got this neat t-shirt from my friend, Kelly. It’s from Kohl’s and it came black and white with markers in a bag. You can color the shirt with the markers. You wash it and the colors wash out, so you can color it again. Very cool. I was so busy with the party, I didn’t get many photos, except her opening her gifts (lots of Barbie stuff). She had fun and that’s what matters most.

On Tuesdays both girls do an after school activity for an hour(at least until December when Jessica’s ends). That means I don’t have to pick them up until an hour later. I don’t know why, but I feel like I have so much more time on those days! And I’ve tried (not very successfully so far) to use that day for crafting. This past Tuesday, I had a ton of projects I wanted to work on. I had one card I had to make for a teacher at the school and once I was done with that, I was going to work on fun ideas for Halloween.

I only managed to finish the card for the teacher. Erggghhh! It’s been a frustrating process for me recently, this trying to make cards gig.

  

Here’s my version of this card. Only without the broom. Because I was running out of time! I did use the Cricut to make the shoes. I don’t have the Top Note die, but the Storybook cartridge has a very similar shape, so I used it and fiddle-futzed to get the shape similar. I ended up reducing the size of the same shape used on the shoes for the sentiment, which is computer generated. This particular teacher’s birthday is on Halloween, hence the theme of the card. I just put the card in her mailbox, so I don’t know if she liked it. She may be tired of getting birthday cards that are this type of theme. The edge punch is a Martha Stewart border punch.  I discovered that Archiver’s carries some twine now. This purple and white is on a card with a few other colors geared for Halloween. It’s put out by Doodlebug. So, I’ve joined the twine wagon, kind of.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you are having a good weekend. Happy Halloween!!

Jeanne

Birthday Card Inspired by Cardmaps Today

My friend, Becky recently gave me this:

 

Thanks, Becky! I really like the cards and designs.

And I came upon this card, which I thought was super cute.

And I found out this morning that today is the birthday of a mom friend of mine at our school. Her kids and mine are good friends and we hang out for a bit after school most days, if the weather cooperates.  She had never mentioned it was her birthday, a little bird told me. So, I ran out and got a little something, something for her and made this card:

I really wanted to do the accordion fold, well, I DID do the accordion fold piece, but I was running out of time and I couldn’t get the folds to stay down,  so I had to come up with Plan B real quick, which was the scallop punch and circle with the button on top. I would have LOVED to have dressed this up more, but Wednesdays are early release days at the school and I literally had like 5 minutes before I had to leave to get to the school after trying to get that accordion piece to stay down.

My friend loved the card, whew! I used papers from DCWV’s Autumn Gathering stack and some kraft cardstock. I punched the butterfly with a Martha Stewart punch and used and a glue dot to put the butterfly onto a Making Memories stick pin. Happy Birthday is from Papertrey Ink.

My friend has been having a bit of a tough time recently and I’m so glad I was able to pull something together to bring a smile to her face.

Thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you are having a great week!

Jeanne

Cupcake Gift Card Holder

We had a birthday party to go to yesterday for my friend, Becky’s son, Aaron. His gift choices are getting a bit more pricey as he gets older and this year I decided we should give him a gift card so he can use it towards something he’s been saving up for. I also thought it would be fun to put that gift card in a cute container. Enter the Sweet Tooth Boxes Cricut cartridge and Echo Park paper from the Little Boy Collection (picked up at Hobby Lobby, with a coupon).

 

To me those polka dots almost look like big sprinkles. Yum! Fun cherry on top, too.

I decided to put in the insert for the cupcake, partially to let Becky see what it looked like and partially to give the base a little more stability.

Thought Aaron would also like a little sugar fix, too. *Ü*  

Birthday card…used the Wild Card cartridge, Echo Park paper and a bit of Holiday Red cardstock (CTMH).

These were fun to make.

Hope you had a great weekend and are ready for a super week!

See you again sometime soon (I hope!)

Jeanne

Halloween Project…

Since I’ve grown so enamored of being able to use the Cricut over these past few years and enjoy seeing projects made from it, I subscribed to the digital version of the Cricut magazine. It used to be published every other month, but recently they switched it to a monthly publication. I’d love to have a hard copy version, but honestly, couldn’t afford it. Love that digital is available. And I can print off the pages I want to use when creating a project.

I really like the October issue. There are several neat projects using Happy Hauntings and the recently released project cartridge called Sweet Tooth Boxes. The project cartridges are just that, more geared toward 3-d type things.  And now that I have the Expression, I don’t have to fiddle-futz too much in trying to make the 3-d stuff. (squeal).

With all that said, here’s something that I’ve been working on. It was a lot of fun to create. Thanks to the magazine for the inspiration, because that’s where I saw this. I never, ever would have come up with this on my own.

   

This is the tool box in the Sweet Tooth Boxes. It opens up and there is a little box inside. You could, if you wanted, put cupcakes inside. There are cut-outs to do just that. The only little glitch I found was that I couldn’t cut the inside box parts the same size as the tool box. I thought it would adjust for the fact that you are putting it inside the tool box and would need to be slightly smaller, but it doesn’t. I made a box for inside (to give the entire thing a little more stability) but I didn’t really decorate it because I’m not sure what I want to do with it.

Anyway, I saw this idea in the Cricut magazine (so I can’t link it). It totally gave me the justification I needed wanted to get the DCWV’s Ghosts and Goblins stack (seriously, I picked it up and put it back so many times before caving).  The black pattern paper is from Lemon Flower (I thought it looked more interesting). The box itself is made from textured black cardstock from Hobby Lobby. The add ons (poison, caution, spiders) are from Happy Hauntings. You can’t really tell but there is glitter glue on the spiders (Jessica did that). They are put on with pop dots. I grabbed three ribbons from my stash, that worked really well and those stick pins are from Making Memories.

I had it all done a week ago, except for the caution and ribbon. I wasn’t sure just what I wanted to do and got inspired yesterday after letting it percolate for a while. I’m pretty happy with the finished project and hope you enjoy it too.

Maybe one if these days I’ll be inspired to pull out Fall/Halloween decorations. My house is sadly bare. I’ve been on a get rid of stuff kick and not a put out a bunch of decorations kick. Sorry.

Thanks for stopping by! Hope you are having a great weekend.

Jeanne

Birthday Cards

Hello! Thanks for the great comments about Amy’s new ‘doo. I completely agree that it makes her look a bit older and that makes me sniff, sniff, but it looks so cute, I can’t be too sad, right? She’s getting lots of positive feedback about it around here, too, so it’s all good.

Steve recently updated Internet Explorer for the computer I use and I got to wondering if Live Writer would work better than it did before. So, I’m trying to use it for this post. Fingers crossed.

In my last post I said that I was going to be making the birthday cards for the staff at the girls’ school. It took a bit of time for the secretary to get me a list of when the birthdays are(she was super busy with more important stuff), so I started out  needing several to be made in short amount of time. If you know how long it takes me to get one made, this is a little stressful for me! LOL. I decided to use some Cricut cuts I’d made when I got the Florals Embellished cartridge, but never put on cards.

So, here they are:

 

The card design on the cards is one I found here. I thought it looked really cool and after a few goof ups in cutting, I finally got the hang of it. The papers on the first two are from DCWV, Autumn Gathering and a little Amber Autumn (from last year). The papers on the next ones are from K & Co, Sweet Nectar.

The last card is a diamond fold. I hadn’t printed off where I found it, so I quick searched Splitcoaststampers for diamond fold card. This is what turned up. Then while scrolling my favorites, I found the inspiration for this card here. The Splitcoast tutorial makes a square card, so I just added the pattern paper rectangles on either size to make it more of a standard rectangle card.

I made the cuts several months ago, so I had to figure out the papers that might best showcase them. I hope they translate well.

 

Thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you have a terrific weekend.

Jeanne