30 Days of Creativity - Days 7 & 8 Fall Leaves

I'm counting these as 2 days worth! I made over 100 of these.
I always save the acetate packaging from things, namely cricut cartridge boxes, trimmed down to the pieces I can store flat. I used alcohol inks and colored many many of these pieces of plastic, then stamped the new Tim Holtz leaves on them, and hand cut them out. On the average piece of re-purposed cricut box sized piece of acrylic I was able to get 3 of these leaves stamped on it. Like I said, I did well over 100 of them! Took me about 7 hours total, including cutting them out.

I will post a picture later of what these are being used for. :)

Scrappinista Club!

 Last month I started designing for my local store Scrapaganza's in-house kit club. Scrapaganza recently held a contest for customers to name their kit club, and "Scrapinista Scrapbook Club" was the winning name. :) 

I just loved this month's kit! The product is My Mind's Eye, a new line, and I just loved the papers and the product we got in the kit for embellishments. If you are a local (Quad Cities, IA & IL) you should stop in and check out the new Club and sign up. In addition to my stuff, there are at least 3 other designers. The store creates a booklet of instructions, photos and how-tos so you can either re-create the pages the designers made or come up with your own pages inspired by designer's work. For now, I will just share what I created for Club. :)

The layout above used a die-cut page from the line, some cardstock, two die-cuts for the title and the tree embellishment, and a metal tag rim from Making Memories that is glittered. I also use a circle template to punch holes and sew brown ribbon in a circle.

Dandelion Boy uses another die-cut sheet but I wanted something a little different than I've done before. I like how it turned out, the way it focuses on the photos. There are a couple other sheets of printed paper, cardstock, a journaling block, an owl sticker, the coordinating letter stickers and some more of the MM tag rims, which I clustered together with ribbons to tie them as embellishments.

I made this mini-book with the remainder of the kit plus I used the cricut to cut out some of the pages in chipboard. I used Storybook because that's the only cartridge that Scrapaganza owns with an owl on it, so Club members can cut their own mini book. There are two pages I did not use the cricut to cut, the tree and the cloud pages, but those were easy for me to hand-draw, which I did. The tree looks just like the tree die-cut that came with the line. I used a Espresso paint dauber to cover the edges of the book. Here are the rest of the pages!

Stay tuned, tomorrow I'm planning to post pics of what I've done for The Story Matters Kit club, Scrapaganza's internet kit club!

Thanks for looking!

Gypsy Spot - altered mailbox

 

For the most part I'm not big into altering things for myself, or even for very many gifts. So when we got the assignment to alter the Target mailboxes for the Gypsy Spot, I thought, what am I going to do with this when I'm done? :)  Originally I thought I'd probably leave it at Scrapaganza as one of my DT store projects for them, but as the creative spirit led me to create this, I realized I was totally creating this for myself. I think this is perhaps the first altered project I have made specifically for myself that is not some sort of photo thing. Nope, this was just for me, just for fun. 

So, to start off, I picked out a red one because I'm not really a pink person, and I thought in the beginning maybe this would end up in Kevin's room or something maybe it should be red. I'm glad I chose red because when I was picking out papers, I went with Graphic 45 papers. The primary sheet of paper was from the recent christmas line, but the printed design is a stylized vine with heart shaped leaves - perfect for a valentine theme too. The back side of that paper also went well so I used it for a couple fill-in strips. The nice thing about G45 papers are that some of the color schemes are used in many of the paper lines, so you can mix papers too, so I used a sheet from another line for the flag.  I picked up the pompom trim at Scrapaganza a while back, and it was exactly what I wanted for this project.

 The big flowers and leaves are made from Tim Holtz grungepaper. I used Tim's last of the 12 tags tutorials to make the roses. I inked them with Fired Brick Distress ink, the leaves with Peeled Paint. The roses were stamped with Studio 490  background stamps. Both the roses and the leaves were cut out on my cricut. Grungepaper cuts like butter! With the GP, I just use my regular blade and multicut 2 to be sure the cut goes all the way through. I treat it like thin chipboard basically. Tip:  put the suede-like side of grungepaper/grungeboard on the mat, it adheres better to the mat and is less likely to move while cutting. The roses were cut with a 6 petaled flower on the recently released Mother's Day cartridge, and the leaf is from A Child's Year, and I made the leaves fatter on my gypsy. That flower from the Mother's Day cart is practically perfect, I had to do much less cutting than Tim's tutorial suggested, as the flower was basically cut just as needed.  The flower sizes shown here are 3.75" and 3" (though that is not how big the flowers are!). I had also cut a third, larger rose but after I made it I realized it overpowered the mailbox, so I did without it.  The little flowers are K&Co, and I found them at my local "everything's a dollar" store. (I bought every package they had muahaha!)

These stamps are all Studio 490 (Wendy Vecchi and Tim Holtz are my fav stamp designers, and I'm not really a big stamper, but Wendy's are my all time favs). I stamped these after I realized this mailbox was for me. :)  The metal parts are Tim Holtz.

Those stamp stickers were in my pile of "will I ever use these?" stickers. lol... I love when I use stash up. I hung one of Tim Holtz's fragments off the flag stop, on the back of the fragment is a bit I cut from one of the G45 papers. Making Memories mini-alphas are on the flag.

Here's a closeup of the fragment, and the bit that I put on the bottom of the flag. The clock is cut from one  of the G45 papers I had, then I covered it with a layer of crackle accents from Ranger. The paper curled a little from that so I had to flatten it as much as I could and glue it to a base of grungboard, which I inked so it wouldn't be real visible. 

And the back end of the mailbox. These are Wendy Vecchi's Studio 490 stamps. 

Thanks for looking!  Now I need to write some love notes to MYSELF! :)

And, as Wendy Vecchi says... "Make Art!"

Altered canvas clock

I created this clock as a gift for a very good friend. We had our little get-together tonight so now that he has it, I can post it here. :)

He's a very busy person, though doing much better at taking time to do other things besides work, I think he sometimes needs a reminder. So this clock has no numbers, as it's not meant to help him keep track of hours. Instead I hoped it would inspire him to take more time for other things that can be just as important as working.

I found this quote and thought it was perfect for this project. The frame is cut from Gypsy Wanderings, on grungeboard, which was inked with Distress inks, then stamped and heat embossed with gold embossing powder. Then I filled the frame in with Glossy Accents.

This large flower was made using the flower tutorial over at StuckOnUSketches. I absolutely love how it turned out. I bought music sheet printed paper at Hobby Lobby which is appropriate for the recipient as he taught himself how to play hammered dulcimer; then cut the layers on my cricut with a flower from Graphically Speaking, inked with Distress Ink and adhered them together. The center is a word charm and spinner from Tim Holtz.

He's also a garden enthusiast, especially growing their own veggies. So I put this little "green man" in the foliage for his interest in gardening sustainably. I just used the same sun cut as the sun on the clock, from Life's a Beach for the green man face, just cut off the rays and glued leaves from A Child's Year on.

The rest of the foliage is from A Child's Year and Lyrical Letters. The flourish is from Home Decor. The tiny blue flowers are from Accent Essentials. There's some bling pearls in the centers of the flowers. The letters are Calligraphy Collection, the moon is from A Child's Year. The background shape is Gypsy Wanderings.

The first thing I did was glue a thick piece of 8.5x11 chipboard to the back of the canvas to stablize the canvas and keep it from warping the canvas due to it's weight. Then I painted the canvas a green to match the papers, and glued on the base papers and background shapes. I then drilled a hole for the clockworks, and put the clockworks together to make sure it worked. I also wanted to see how high the clock hands were so that I didn't put any embellishments where the hands would hit.

Then I cut and glued down the words around the clock face, cut and assembled the embellishments and glued them down.  After everything was done, I took the hands off the clock again, covered the shaft of the clockworks with a lid from something and sprayed the entire thing with a spray that is supposed to protect the surface of paper projects, giving them water resistence, UV protection, etc. I just wanted to make the clock easier to dust later. After the stuff was dry (it dried quick) I replaced the clock hands.

I loved doing this project and I'm really proud of it. But I'm glad it's done and gone! It was very time consuming, LOL!

Thanks for looking!

The Gypsy Spot - Gift Box

Hello hello! So, the challenge this week over at The Gypsy Spot is Gift Packaging!

Well, I had no idea what I was going to do around this time last sunday. But when I went to work on monday, a coworker set out some candy in these really neat boxes that she'd brought back from vacation. When the boxes were empty, I snatched them out of the trash. lol!  I took one apart so I could get an idea on construction, and created the box on my Gypsy!

I am making the cut file available for download HERE. This is Gypsy users only as I made it with Gypsy cartridges. However, if your Design Studio is the most current version, you could easilyopen the file and re-create it with the simple shapes I used (circles, rectangles, triangles mostly).  The box does include score marks even though I hate messing with them, but only because it's difficult to know where to score otherwise.

The decorations on the outside of this box are Winter Woodland (cardinal) and Joys of the Season (holly branch which I snipped and altered a little).

First of all, if you don't know yet, when you score a box you need to do the score indentation on the OUTSIDE of a fold, okay? This is important because this box has folds going in both directions.

Here is what the box looks like after cutting and this is the OUTSIDE of the box, and these red lines mark where you are doing the scoring indentation. Fairly easy.  Now flip it over...

 This is the INSIDE of the box, and you score (indentation) on these diagonal lines. If you cut this file you will notice that instead of tiny score marks, there is a long slit along these lines. The box I used as inspiration had this long slit and I believe it is because these folds need the extra bend that the slit gives them. At least I found the boxes fold easier because of those slits.

This is the (inside) box after I've folded along all the score lines in the correct direction.

 

There are two tabs on the side. I ran my favorite adhesive along those tabs and glued the box together.

This is the bottom, and I ran some adhesive on the tabs that are on the 6 sided shape here. However, notice the stop sign shape is not a precise fit. Sorry. I got sick of having to fix the weld every time I tried to get this to fit right. So I threw in the towel and said an "almost fit" is better than not being able to get it to weld correctly. lol  You don't notice the imprecise fit after the flaps are glued down. If you are more obsessive than me, you can fix the fit! lol

Glue all the flaps down with the longest one being the last. I realize the flaps look odd, but I based the shapes of them off the original box. The longest flap seems to stablize the box when it is standing.

Now the box is standing upright. If this had been cut from my printed cardstock, I would decorate it now.

Hopefully you pre-folded along all the scoring. The top should go together like this fairly easily, if you scored it correctly. The diagonal folds are "valleys" and the straight folds are "mountains".  This view of the closed top is how I left my finished box above, as I like it this way.

However, you can collapse the iris style top even further so that it is somewhat concave and rather pretty. This would be useful for mailing, or if you've made several and need to stack them in a bag or box.

Here is the original candy box and my re-creation. My box is smaller because I sized it for a 12x12 mat so I could use printed cardstock. If you want it bigger, you'd have to go to the trouble of grouping everything (including score marks) and resize it. If you do that, be sure to save it under a different name just in case, so the original file is still there.

I hope you enjoy this box and find it useful! Good timing for the Holiday season. You know some of the craft stores have poster board that is gold like the original candy box. I bet that would be pretty for a gift box! These would be great for homemade candies and cookies too!

Thanks for looking!

Canvas gift

I made one of these in a class at my local scrapbook store, and loved it. I decided to make another as a gift for my mother-in-law. She was going to buy a new house, and would have had many walls to fill when I started making this. She changed her mind about the house but I'm still giving her the canvas for her wall where she lives now. :)

The photo was taken by Penny Smith while my son and I were at the scrapbook store, and I stalked Penny till she sent me the photo... I love it!

I bought a canvas on sale at JoAnn's, painted the edges with acrylic paints, also bought wooden letters and painted those, distressed the letters with cats eye inks. Glued papers down with fabri-tac. Cut out bird shapes and fence with the cricut, glittered the birds, embossed the fence. Glued down my embellies. I won't say it was really quick, but it was pretty easy!

Thanks for looking. :)

Owl Birthday Card and Summer Folio

A super simple card that I did for my son's BFF (the babysitter's boy).  I combined challenges again (I don't have time to not combine unfortunately!).  I am submitting this for Inspirational Card Sketches and for BITTEN by the BUG.  This was done on my cricut, with the Wild Card cartridge using "What a Hoot" line papers from Pinecone Press.

 

 

I've been working on this folio all week. I took the folio base from a kit I got at my LSS Scrapaganza and used papers from the 3 Bugs in a Rug Snips & Snails line that I got from Scrapbook Dreamer.  I did the folio to fit a couple challenges over at the Scrapbook Dreamer Forum.

 

  

  

  

  

Thanks for looking!