Birthday Card: Dressed in Twine, Part IV - Top Load Notecard Holders

On the day I started this project, I received my very first batch of bakers twine in the mail. I ordered several samples from SeeSpotStamp's Etsy Store after doing calculations upon calculations of the cost per yard for all the bakers twine sold on Etsy. SeeSpotStamp had the best price for nice colors at about 6cents per yard. Can't beat that considering other brands were coming to 20cents per yard.

Lets regress to the elements that comprise of this project:

[Theme] This project got it's pink theme because I wanted to use the Cherry colored bakers twine

[Dress Form Shape] Because the theme was pink, I chose to use Silhouette's dress form shape. I make it a habit to open Silhouette Studio each week to download the free shape of the week. The dress form was that weeks shape.
[Birthday cutout] How dull would it have been if I just made the text straight across? Luckily I stumbled upon this Silhouette tutorial that demonstrates the ease of laying out text along a line or a shape. I should have known that the font was going to cut real thin. Unlike the other two holders, I had to reinforce this one because it was too flimsy alone. I glued a 3"x3" square piece of cream colored cardstock that was stamped using a circle pattern rubber stamp and distress ink.
And this birthday card for my sister concludes the Top Load Notecard Holder sequence!

Open Gate Birthday Wishes

I gave this Cuttlebug challenge a try - too bad I was one day too late.

Birthday Card: Mark your calendar

Thanks to all that inspired me for this one.

Printed calendar: Member Gallery Post @ Two Peas in a Bucket
Faux Stitching on calendar: Finally Friday @ Two Peas in a Bucket
Doily: Valentine's Day Cards @ Marth Stewart
Printed calendar and date cutout: Tim Holtz's 12 tags of Christmas 2008

Birthday Cards: Part I - Top Load Notecard Holders

I'm SUPER excited about these three birthday cards. These are inspired by Kerri Bradford's Signed.Sealed.Delivered. Kit. I decided to step away from bi-fold cards for a little while and went with top loading 'notecard holders' since they can't really be called envelopes. And I finally got to use the Polka Dot paper I bought on sale from Print Icon. I'm so happy I did!
The problem with making cards so far in advance is that I don't get to post about them until the recipients have received them. But the upside of having time to think up a likable idea outweighs the cons. So, details of each card will come within the next two months.




P.S. I sure hope I'm sticking with the etiquette guidelines that D*S recently posted. I need to be mindful of always crediting the source of these inspirations. Hopefully none of it is considered copying.

P.P.S. Something is terribly wrong with Safari now that I've moved to Snow Leopard on my MacBook. What the heck is going on!? I find it odd that Firefox works better than Safari does on my Mac. Tisk tisk. First time I have to talk down on Apple. It's a sad sad day.

Gift Wrapped 30th Birthday Card: Bows Glitter and Embossing

I got to practice a new technique and refine two others. This was inspired by Martha Stewarts Holiday Gift Wrapped Cards idea.

Refined technique #1: How to tie a perfect bow. Too bad the ribbon preferred to be straight. I'll never use that style of ribbon again.

Refined technique #2: Glittering. My sister wouldn't be happy if I told her I used spray adhesive for the '30' glitter tag. But, I do have to say that the 3M spray adhesive I used is great. It's super tacky, doesn't stain and doesn't curl the paper. All other adhesives are just nightmares to work with.

New Technique #1: Embossing. looking at the pictures, the embossing looks like it can be both ways. Either you see drops that look like water that form an outline around the letters (this is the melted embossing powder) or you see the letters raised off the paper (just an illusion). A little messy for the first time but not too bad huh? Especially since I'm too cheap to buy a heating tool and opted to hold an iron within millimeters of the paper instead.

Birthday Card: Reincarnation of Bon Voyage Plane

Look familiar? Minor adjustment - this time it's a birthday card to a dear friend that lives far away. And instead of just a regular blank page, I made it a cloud that folds down. I hope she likes it!

Bon Voyage Transparent Card: Taking flight!

I needed A LOT of inspiration to make this Bon Voyage card. After my disaster of a 'Aging like fine wine' Birthday Card, I had to make this next card a good one. Especially since the recipient and the signers are people who are all very talented artists.

I searched the words 'bon voyage' in Google Reader (basically searching all the blogs I subscribe to) and found this Eat Drink Chic inspiration post. I went with the plane in flight, gave it a little message in tow, stuck with my transparent card theme, and incorporated photos of his friends who will dearly miss him.

Here are the raw parts cut and also sketched using my Silhouette:

And here is everything put together.

Birthday Card: Battle of the composition versus color

This card just needed help in general. Poor color choices and poor allocation of content. This is a post of what NOT to do in the figure.

UGH.

Make It Yourself Silhouette Sketch Pen

My adventures of shopping for the best price on Silhouette Blade Replacements took me toScrapbook Express. For kicks, I also picked up the Silhouette Ballpoint Pen Holder.

Talk about cool! Now there's a way to 'print' on tiny pieces of scrap paper. Furthering my 'green' efforts!

Pretty neat huh? This technique was used on a transparent wedding card. As an aside, here's a shot of the backside stamped with the color Velvet from the Mosaic ColorBox PetalPoint Option Pigment Ink Pad. It must be my ignorance of what Pigment Ink can be used for but it's nice to see the light color ink show on the dark color cardstock.

Transparency Card part II: Encouraging our New Service Men

I went a little crazy with the spray adhesive on this one so now I'm typing with sticky fingers. I made a huge Silhouette Studio discovering with this project - Auto Trace! Yep, the new version provides auto trace with imported JPG images. KILLER! See the silhouette of a police badge? Yep - an imported JPG image that's been traced.

I made a blunder though - my blade lost it's oomph cutting the transparency papers. I'm not sure if the paper did it or it was just worn down already but I'm pretty disappointed that it's only been 3 months and the blade has already crapped out on me. OH well, blade #1, It's been a good run.

Card: Happy New Years in a Transparent Kind of Way

I think it's absolutely genius that the company that markets the Silhouette Machine ALSO has a blog of fabulous ideas! I fell in love when I saw this post about creating a card using transparency paper. It took me two months to convince myself to buy the transparency paper but $32 & 100 Write-Only transparency sheets later, my creation was made.

Cards made out of transparency paper has it's downfalls though.

1. It's probably not the greenest of products.
2. Fingerprints get EVERYWHERE!
3. The Silhouette has to be on the highest force setting possible to cut the dang transparency paper.
4. Damn that paper, especially if you want the inkjet printing compatible version, is SUPER expensive.
5. Whatever you choose to affix on it has to be glued on discretely or very neatly.

On the plus side, It doesn't warp when peeling it off the Silhouette cutting mat like paper does and it doesn't leave residue (that I can see at least) to further de-stickify the cutting mat. And ultimately, it's unique and pretty stunning in my opinion!

Tools used for this project:

1. Silhouette SD (both in cut only mode and print & cut using Registration Marks)

2. Double sided tape to tape the ribbon

3. 3M spray adhesive

A Dino-mite Birthday Card?

Inspired by some Member Gallery photos on Two Peas In a Bucket, this dinosaur birthday card was 4 evenings in the making.

It's not my best work, not even good work. To be honest, I don't like it at all. Maybe it was the choice of colors but it looks like a kindergarten project. But, it did take me a while and is probably the most involved card I've made to date.

The paper used for the trees were printed with an argyle pattern. Then each dinosaur and tree was cut using the Silhouette SD then colored using Distress Ink - Antique Linen. A little bit of gold pigment ink was added to the dinosaurs and then finally I used a happy birthday stamp to randomly stamp the dinosaurs using distress ink again. The banner was made using Illustrator based on instructions found on the web and were touched up with distress ink as well. I got the depth perception I was looking for but SOMETHING is missing. What is it???

On the bright side, I got to finally use my stamp from China. Looks neats!

Farewell Card: So Long, Farewell

Auf Weidersehen, goodbye. Yet another co-worker departs. This time it's the Mexican Bagpiper.

Resources:

Free music scores

Anniversary & Birthday Cards: Paint the Town Red

This is what happens when all I have is a small collection of card stock colors and Anniversaries and Birthdays coming up.

First up is the Birthday Card. Totally loving the Silhouette numbers.

And here we have the Anniversary cards. Again, loving the laser cut images courtesy of my new Silhouette. You can see some of the flaws due to my impatient. Pulling vs. patiently x-acto kniving.

Anniversary Card: A new chapter in the yearbook

This weekend makes it 5 years of being with D. Happy Anniversary D.

Welcome Home

My aunt and uncle are movin on up...

So in celebration of their new home away from home, I put my new Silhouette to work. In are a bunch of rectangles, out comes a mini condo building.

It's an 8.5" x 11" brochure paper which I printed, cut, and folded into a tri-fold. Then velum paper was glued between the first two folds. It was tough getting the paper to crease at the right places because the windows were so close to the edge. To avoid ripping the cut out window panes, I place a hard cover book over one side, then slowly folded over the free side. It's on boring white paper, but, I guess I can live with white chic for now.