Creating a Faux Glass Mosaic Card with your Cricut

There are just a ton of free stencil type images available for use with your SCAL and cricut. For paper piecing, these images don't work well, but for creating a faux glass mosaic, they are perfect. This image was from the free font wwspringtime which has a BUNCH that will work with this technique. If your a stamper, you've probably done something similar with stamped/embossed images (its is one of my long time favorite techniques), if not...here's how:

1. Cut you stencil type image with your cricut and trim to size.

2. Flip your image over and attach a piece of velum paper over the cutout image.

3. Color the open areas of the image, you don't need to be neat about it, errors will not show (that's why its my favorite, see photo below)

4. Mat your image - different colors of mat will change the look, just experiment until you have the look you like.

5. Mount to card and embellish.

This is the back side before adding a mat, you can see you do NOT need to be very careful with the coloring .

LOVE : recycling those stamp blocks!

I've started unmounting my stamps to save some room. The problem is that I can't bare to throw away perfectly good blocks. So, I guess I didn't really save any room, just rearranged a bit. Here are some I did yesterday to set out for Valentines. For my unmounting I'm zapping the stamps in the microwave for about 12 seconds, pealing off the rubber/foam, pealing the sticker, putting the sticker onto the foam, then putting a thin coat of Aleens tack it over and over on the sticker and storing in cd cases. Not perfect, but Aleens at Micheals is about $3 with a coupon and the sheets of cling are about that for one 8x11 sheet (plus shipping). There are a ton of different ways to do this, but this seems to work the best for me. This leaves a sticky block, which you can sand, or just add paper :) I used Storybook and vinyl for the letters.

Before

unmounted, adding a layer of glue

Into a cd case

Kindergarten Cuties Scrap Page

I wanted to do a scrap page and use some of the new loopy stuff I've been working on. This is my boys heading to thier first day of Kindergarten. Final size is 8 by 8. Thanks for looking.

Feeling loopy - loopy border and frame svg

I have 2 free svgs to give away today, one is a loopy border (12 by .5 inch for scrapping) and one is a loopy circle frame. The frame I used on the card above cut at like 3.75 inches. The gift is from the Joys of the Season (cut at 1.5 inches).

 Expired

Altered Clipboard

Heres a quick and fun gift for your favorite teacher...an altered clipboard. Start with a $1 clipboard, paint it with acrylic paint, cover with some designer paper, and add a name and some ribbon and voila (seriously, this is a quick and inexpensive gift that will impress your friends)!

I used Stampin Up! paper, which I attached with my ATG gun (you can also use Modge Podge), added whatever ribbon I could find to match, then cut the name from vinyl (amazing that I had vinyl that was a perfect color match to the paper!). I sanded the edges to get around the corners and for the top piece I just cut out a rectange from the paper, the ribbon hides most of it, and if you've painted the clipboard first, nobody will see its not a perfect fit. This is a gift for my friends birthday :) Hope she likes it, thanks for looking!

Really Good Fortune Scrap Page

I usally scrap only pages for my kids or trips, but today when I went to lunch today and got this fortune in my cookie, I HAD to come home and scrap it...it said:

More art in your life at this time will help you feel better.

Yep, its right!

Heart Stems Anniversary Card and SVG

This is for an anniversary card but would also make a nice Valentines day card. The svg was done in inkscape and includes the stem layer (green), the outer heart layer (red) and an inset heart layer (white glitter). The swirls were done with my cuttlebug, the border is MarthaStuart, and the stamps are Stampin Up. SVG is below, thanks for looking.

psi_heartstems.svg

Songbird Card

Here is what started out as a very simple card with my new Songbird cartridge. I cut the house piece at 2 1/2, the white frame at 2 1/4, and the bird/branch at 1 3/4.

NOW let me tell you why this card took me well over 2 hours to make. So the first thing I went to cut was the branch at 2 inches. I ended up with a mess. Thinking I had the wrong setting for the paper, I tried adjusting the settings. I think I tried just about every possible setting combination, even a new blade and a new mat, and still got a mess. I went through countless pieces of paper, and tried several brands of paper. I was sure I either had a bad cartridge or broken cricut, so I tried a similar cut on my Storybook cart - same thing happened. Now I'm sure its the cricut. But before I give up I think, lets try a bigger size, maybe the cuts just won't do at the small size anymore - so I try 2 1/2...works great - YEAH! Then I try 2 1/4, still cuts great- really? Then, get this, I try 1 3/4, works great. All that time and paper waisted because it won't cut at 2 inch. I don't know why, maybe its always done that, usually I'm hooked to DS or SCAL, so maybe its always been that way and I never noticed. Chances are its just a glitch in my machine, but I wanted to tell my story anyway in the event someone should at some point have a similar problem, before you waist precious time and paper, before you throw that cricut from a second story window in frustration (no, I didn't do that, but it was close)....change the size.

here is a photo, the center mess is 2 inch

Oops....I posted the wrong file

I made another onsie file that was to be used as a shower invite long ago. It was smaller and closed at the bottom. I acidentally loaded that one under the onsie file I posted Saturday. If you downloaded it, please delete it and download the correct one - its much cuter :)

Onsie Card SCUT for SCAL2

There are a couple little ones that will be arriving in our family soon, so I thought I'd get started on some cards for them. I actually have New Arrival, which has a very cute onsie on it, but when I made a card with it, the proportions didn't work out to put snaps on the bottom (and I had my heart set on putting snaps on). Soooo, I was forced to make one in inkscape. The file has a top (which I used in the pink version) and has ribbing ( the blue accents I used in the boy version). For the pink one, I ran the top piece through a cuttlebug and added lace accents. For the boy, I just discarded the top layer and used the card base with the ribbing, and then added the airplane (from New Arrival, cut at 1 inch). These are in SCAL2 and can be resized, but at the current size they just fit into a A2 envelope.

the (now corrected) SCUT file:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yyoztawzneq/PSI_Onsiescard.scut