Fisherman Birthday Card

My husband's birthday was last week, and I wanted to make something that represented part of who he is. He loves fishing, so I grabbed my Everyday Paper Dolls Cricut cartridge, a scrap of Bo Bunny Knight in Shining Armor paper, and the paper I needed to make the cuts, and got to work.

I cut a cattail border in dark green at 1.5". Since the borders on this cartridge are single color borders, I used my Burnt Umber Copic Ciao marker (E29) to color the tops of the cattails. I then cut the man out at 4". I decided I wanted the big smiley face rather than the one that comes on the body, so I cut the head off the body and put the big smiley face in its place.

I then cut out all the clothes (<Fisher>), the fishing basket (select Accessories 1, then Shift, then <Fisher>), and the fishing pole (select Accessories 2, then <Fisher>). I decided to put some fishing line on the pole using Sew Easy's bakers twine, and used my Zig Two-Way glue pen to glue it down. To give the man freckles, I used my Brick Beige Copic Ciao marker (E31).

When I was at the National Scrapbook Day crop, I won a couple of stamps in a door prize, and one of them was a little stamp that said "Give me the simple life." I felt that was appropriate for this card, so I stamped it using American Crafts Chestnut ink. For the inside, I used Tim Holtz's Way With Words stamp, and then used a "Happy Birthday" stamp that I had from another collection.

I used a really neat tool called a Stamp-A-Ma-Jig by Inkadinkado to help me stamp straight. If you are a stamper, I highly recommend getting one of these tools, especially for those stamps that just aren't mounted right! I won this at a crop, and now I wish I had been using one all along! 

My husband really liked his birthday card, and had a great birthday all around. Thank you for joining me today, and happy crafting!

Train Party Invitation

Good evening! I hope you're having a great Saturday! This week I've been working on invitations for a friend for her son's third birthday party. She has been planning on a train birthday party, but couldn't find invitations with a train. I told her that I could make what she wanted and got to work!

I used three Cricut cartridges to make this card. To start, I made my own embossing plate using cut up cereal boxes. I wanted to emboss clouds on the background paper, but didn't have an embossing folder with clouds. I used Create a Critter to cut a couple of clouds (it's the accessory to the sun and rainbow), and used my tape runner to glue the chipboard clouds to a 5x7" piece of chipboard. (Just a note: if you've never cut chipboard on your Cricut before, you must have the deep cut blade and housing, and tape all sides down. It also helps to use a new mat.)

To emboss the blue background, I had to use a Spellbinders embossing mat along with my A plate and both B plates for my Cuttlebug. After I embossed my blue background (which was cut 4x6"), I used my Pebbles Basic Brights Chalk to color the edges of the clouds white.

For the train, I used B is for Boy. I love that my Expression has a quantity function so I can cut multiples of the same item without hitting "cut" over and over. I then ran all the train pieces through my Xyron and ended up with a train of.... trains. (The trains are three inches, in case you were wondering!)

For my last cuts, I needed puffs of steam, so I cut three different sizes of clouds from Everyday Paper Dolls (Accessory 3 for the rain coat). I cut them at .75, 1, and 1.25 inches. I then stamped them with my Ranger Big & Bossy embossing ink pad, dusted them with Zing black embossing powder, and got busy with the heat gun. I used foam adhesive squares to adhere them to the card to give it some more dimension.

I used pre-made 5x7" cards from The Paper Studio, but cut them down to 4 1/4 x 6 1/4" so they didn't dwarf the blue cardstock. 

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again!