So Sorry

I created this card using a KaiserCraft blue card base.  I then cut a piece of white card stock slightly smaller than the base and ran it through the Cuttlebug with the Victoria embossing folder.  At the bottom I placed a piece of scrap Fancy Pants patterned paper.  I cut a scalloped mat out of coordinating blue card stock using the Silhouette.  I printed a digital stamp by Angelique Kramer aka Sliekje  and coloured it using Lyra fine art pencils.  I added the sentiment using a sparkly blue gel pen.  I added the matted stamped image just above the patterned paper.  I tied a bow from blue satin 1" ribbon using my bow easy and adhered it to the same ribbon I placed on the crease of the patterned paper and stamped image.  I inked, shaped and layered two card stock flowers I purchased from Dollarama and added a Kaisercraft pearl to the center.  I punched, inked and shaped two leaves using the Martha Stewart rose leaf punch and added them under the flower.  I then glued the flower with leaves under the bow of the card.

Dressing up punchy or die cut flowers and leaves

Here is a quick tutorial on how to dress up your flat punchie/diecut flowers and leaves to use on a layout or a card. I used this flower on the I'm sorry card, although I have other examples of similar flowers on my blog.

We could just layer the flowers and leaf together like this, and it would be okay, but I'm going to show you how to add some dimension and pizazz.

First of all take a nice shade of ink slightly darker than your flower or leaf or a nice coordinating colour and ink the edges.

Secondly find an object with a nice rounded end (possibly a rounded capped pen, I have a jumbo dry embossing tip).  Lay the first layer of your flower in your palm and press the rounded object into the center and cup your hand to force the petals up.  Repeat the process with the other/remaining layers of your flowers.

(isn't DH a sweetie for modeling this for me )
Take the leaf and bend it from the stem to the tip of the leaf , preferably not in a perfectly straight line.

Take a pearl, jewel, brad or some stickles and add it to the center of the smallest/inner flower.  Glue the layers of the flowers together, offsetting the petals of the layer above it to the spaces of the flower below it. Add a little bit of glue to the stem(s) of the leaf and adhere to the bottom of the finished flower.

Now you're ready to add the flower to your layout or card

2 wedding cards

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted here, and in reality I have so much to share!  Hopefully I will get all my projects posted here to share with you.  First off I want to share 2 wedding cards with you that I created for a swap.

I started this card with a white 4 1/4x5 1/2 inch base, I covered that with a piece of black card stock that I edged with LuminArte pewter Shimmering Mist slightly smaller than the base.  I then cut another piece of white card stock slightly smaller than the black and ran it through the Cuttlebug with Tim Holtz Damask embossing Folder.  Then I cut the bride and groom out of shimmery black paper using my Silhouette and mounted it on the lower right hand corner of the card.  Next I took a piece of 1" wide black satin ribbon and tied a bow using the bow easy, and notched the tails with a pair of scissors.  I placed that in the top left hand corner of the card and tucked three pieces of pearl spray and one ribbon flower  under the bow.  (Both the pearl spray and the ribbon flower can be found in the wedding section of most craft stores).  Once I had all three embellishments placed to my liking I adhered them with Tombo Mono Multi liquid glue.  The finished result is a classic black and white wedding card.



The second card I also started with a white quarter fold card stock base.  I then took a piece of 4 1/4 inch square white card stock and ran it through the Cuttlebug with the Tim Holtz Regal embossing folder.  I then took some green card stock and cut two border strips using the Martha Stewart Doily Edger.  I adhered these to the back of the embossed card stock at the top and bottom.  I centered this on my base.  Next I cut out a scalloped oval from green card stock and two white card stock ovals using my Silhouette.  I first printed the sentiment in the same green colour as the card stock onto the larger oval. (A small tutorial on how I do this will follow.)  It then glued the smaller oval to back of the large oval and used my embossing stylus to emboss the edge of the large oval.  Unless you are doing multiple cards and want to reuse the small oval there is no need to remove it.  I then adhered the large oval to the scalloped oval.  I adhered the sentiment to the middle of the embossed card stock.  I then cut a series of flowers from white card stock using my Silhouette.  Each flower has two layers, the larger of each I coloured a light purple using Twinkling H20s.  I shaped them Glued them together and added a KaiserCraft Pearl to the center and added some glitter around each pearl.  I adhered one large and two smaller flowers on the top left hand side and a large and small flower to the bottom right hand corner of the sentiment.  I cut some leaves using the Martha Stewart twig punch out of the green card stock and tucked them under the flowers.  I tucked a piece of 1/8" white satin ribbon under the flowers in the top corner and glued down the tails towards the bottom and the right hand side of the card,  Lastly I took s small green satin butterfly and added rhinestones to it's body and adhered it just above the flowers in the bottom corner of the card.

Printing text on a diecut in a coordinating colour.

Here is a small tutorial on how printed the text in a coordinating colour on a die cut, like I showed in this card.  First of all I scan whatever it is I am drawing my colour inspiration for the text, and save it to my computer.  I open up the file using my photo editing software, which in my case is GIMP.  I use the colour selection tool and grab the colour from the file I am interested in.  Most software allow you to change the size of the area of the colour selector.  If your source has intricate variation in colour it is best to set the size small so you do not pick up the neighbouring colours as well.  If the area is large then setting a larger size will blend together all the shades within the field that the scanner picks up giving you the colour your eye perceives.

Open up a new document and set up your sentiment using a favourite font.  Adjust the size of the text so it will fit inside the dimensions of your die cut.  It is aesthetically pleasing to leave some white space all around the sentiment as long as the text is still in a legible size.  Print this out on a piece of scrap printer paper.  Double check that you are satisfied with the colour and size of the text relative to the die cut.   Add a few small dabs of (temporary) adhesive to the back of your die cut and center it over the text on your scrap paper.  Next take another another small strip of scrap paper and place it over the top edge of the die cut without interfering with the printed sentiment.  Place a piece of scotch tape over the top of the scrap strip.  Doing this will prevent the die cut from jamming in your printer instead giving it a smooth line to feed in.  Place the scrap paper back into your printer in the same direction you originally had it and print the sentiment again.  This should give you a perfectly placed sentiment in a coordinating colour on your die cut.  You can go ahead and remove it from the scrap paper.  If you didn't use temporary adhesive, because the scrap paper is much lighter it will rip more easily than your card stock and you should have no problems.

Happy Birthday

Can you imagine turning 93!  What an awesome blessing to reach that age in good physical and mental health.  We just celebrated the birthday of a wonderful lady who reached that milestone in her life.  I created a lovely card  to celebrate the occasion.  I started by creating a slightly smaller than 6"x6" base out of purple bazzill so it would slide into the 6x6 envelope I had.  I then cut a piece of white card stock and

patterned paper consecutively smaller than the base and adhered them.  (Sorry the patterned paper comes from an old kit at KC that I had cut a piece from already and I don't know who the manufacturer is.)  I then cut two frames, the larger is 4".  I inked the larger one with Adirondack Willow ink, and printed the verse from 'The Ultimate Guide to the Perfect Card' on the smaller frame in a darker green (for legibility) using the font Marnie Regular.  I then glued them together.  Before adhering this to the card front I added a strip of K&Company Smitten adhesive paper ribbon to the card front where the lower half of the frame would be adhered.  I then went ahead and adhered the frame.  I also cut 3 smaller and 2 larger flowers from white card stock using my Silhouette.  I inked one of the smaller flowers a light pink colour, and the other two with Periwinkle Adirondack ink.  The two larger flowers I lightly inked the edges using the Willow ink.  After shaping my flowers I added jewels and a pearl (by Kaisercraft) to the center of the smaller ones.  I also selected a larger purple silk blossom and added the small pink flower to the center; and adhered it to the bottom left corner of the frame.  I then layer the periwinkle and Willow green flowers and adhered them on either side of the silk blossom.  I also added a small green Kaisercraft jewel to the top and bottom points of the frame.  I then took two colours of green card stock and punched out rose leaves and twigs (by Martha Stewart).  I shaped the rose leaves to give them some definition, and adhered the punchies under the flowers.  As a final touch to the front card I took a Make it Special butterfly and adhered 3 small green Kaisercraft jewels to it's body and adhered it above the floral arrangement.  As a final finishing touch I printed Psalm 118:24 along the bottom of a piece of card stock using the font and colour as the front of the card and lined the inside of the card leaving a small purple edge showing.  Happy Birthday to our dear young at heart friend.

Higher and Higher

This layout was created for another rendition of layout tag.  I was given this layout by passion4scrappin to lift.  I decided to keep the general layout the same except that because I do scrap 8 1/2x11 I reduced the number of pictures to fill the width of the page.  I maintained the background paper (3 Bugs in a Rug, Seeing Stars, Fancy) with the small strips along the top and bottom except that I switched out for a fancier edge (3 borders from Silhouette) cut on my Silhouette. I chose to matte the pictures; the smaller pictures were matted on a continuous strip running the width of the page and sanded the edges, and I double matted the larger picture.  I inked the edges with a cloudy blue Adirondack ink.  I ran my tracing wheel along the top and bottom of the patterned paper to give the illusion of stitching.  I then cut out two leafy branches using my Silhouette and used some water colour crayons to give some definition/veins to the leaves.  I added them above the pictures on the right and below the pictures on the left using some strategically placed foam adhesive squares to add depth to some leaves and not to others.  Using a date stamp and black CTMH ink I stamped the date on small  piece of white card stock and rounded the bottom edges.  I then inked the edges using the same blue ink, added dots of Pesto Adirondack Acrylics on either side and adhered it just under the mat below the large photo.  Above the smaller photos I adhered a sticker from the Seeing Stars collection using foam adhesive.  I then added the title using Make it Special foam alphabet stickers that I covered with card stock and a smaller version of the letters cut from card stock. Here is a tutorial on how I used my Silhouette to cover the foam stickers using card stock.  The word 'and' was done using Provocraft Leere Black Alphabitty stickers.  I love the way this layout turned out and highlight these great pictures.  I love the delight you can see on the smile on his face; kids are so wonderfully authentic!

Covering Foam Stickers with paper using the Silhouette.

Image 2

Image 1

I'm going to give you a quick tutorial on covering foam stickers or chipboard with paper using your Silhouette.  I'm going to presume you are comfortable using your photo editing software.  First of all you need to take the items you want to cover and scan them at 300 dpi (this is important because it will allow you to cut your paper at the exact same size as the material you are covering).  It is best if there is good contrast between the background and the items being scanned.  Import this into your photo editing software and remove the background. For this example (Image 1), even though I used a white alphabet, I scanned a black version because it has great contrast to the background they are mounted on.  If you only have white/light colour you may need to  create the contrast by temporarily adhering it to some clear plastic and use black card stock behind that in your scan.

Image 3

Image 5

Image 4

Image 6

Image7

Because I have great contrast here I could simply play with the contrast of the colours to change it to this pure black and white image (Image 2).  You may need to manually erase some of the edges paying a bit of attention to any shadows cast in the scan as well.  Convert this to a black and white image to get the maximum contrast which will make it easier for Robomaster to detect the edges when you get the outline.   One way to achieve this is to remove the white background and then selecting what is left behind. If you then create a new transparent layer you can use black bucket fill to fill the letters.  Then add a new white layer below this and flatten it to get a pure black and white image.  Since I scanned the entire sticker sheet I then cut and pasted the letters I needed (the r was on a second sheet I didn't show for brevity).   Save this file (Image 3).

Open up the Robomaster software and create a new file.  Click on the 'Get Outline' button (Image 4).  Select File, then 'Load Image' and open the saved image which should look like image 5.  Select 'Convert to Outline'  and it will look like Image 6.  If the outline is not as smooth  as you'd like you can select 'Edit Image' and adjust the threshold.  If you only have an occasional 'blip' where it's not as smooth as you'd like you can play with the Delete/Add Break Point functions.  When you're finished editing select 'Paste then Exit' button and click on your document where you'd like to place it (Image 7).  DO NOTadjust the size.  Finally cut this out using your Silhouette and you will get perfectly sized paper to cover your chipboard or foam alphabet stickers.

You can see the finished product I used on this Layout.