cricut THIS!

I can make a quick card without a lot of thought and effort with the available "card option" on many carts. Needed a baby card but I did not exactly want to spend half a day on one. I don't even have a new arrival or baby cartridge. But, oh see here, the Stretch your Imagination cart has just what I needed:



This is key 40 using the card option and then the card frame option at 5 inches size. I tweaked this just a little bit with hand cutting the inner frame of the card frame a touch larger, and no it doesn't bother me a bit that it is not exact but a big wiggly! I also decided to cut my own base card (the light green) and cut off half of the cricut card base so that I get a nice green border around the entire thing. Add just a touch of stickles to the design, a simple ribbon around the frame and done :) Very easy and quick (well, except for waiting for the stickles to dry) and not too shabby looking.

The Stretch Your imagination cart also has a baby icon on key 39.

This month for MidWestStampers the mingle ATC theme is "two colors and/or brads". My recipient is a cat lover, so I thought to play with that theme a bit here. I used the first item in the card function of A Child's Year cartridge to make my ATC base card. Size 5 by 3.5 inches (to fold). I prefer to delete the nick marks for folding from the item with "hide selected line". The cat cutout can be found on the Animal Kingdom cart. I flipped the shape and added it to the scalloped side of the base card at 1.8 by 2.8 size.



The background behind the cat is a custom watercolor background leftover from another project. I stamped a fun kittie background over the front and back of the base card with gold pigment ink and clear embossed that. Stamp is from DRS designs. My brads are two greenish yellow crystal brads from the stash. Some eyelash yarn trapped inside the card and as a tail finishes this nicely.

Kinda sad when you forget the login for your own blog, isn't it? my way of saying, its been a while....
Today I was playing around with the Pagoda cartridge and Design Studio. I like the card option function, even if I don't necessarily like their odd sizes of the resulting cards. But most of the design shapes are flexible enough so that you can shift the card size to a regular 5.5 by 4.25 inch card! Meaning, if you stretch the design it still looks good and not funky out of whack. For this example I used the card option with the bird3 (key 16) and put in the dimensions in the Shape Properties : Width 11, Height 4.25:



I also added the character for "Happiness" in the lower corner of the card front. Some of the characters are slightly different for the "tag/card" option when compared to the die cut option, if you want to keep the background with an image cut out, use the card/tag option for the character, it will look clearer. Example "happiness" (key22):



Left is the regular character (I colored in the three small center cuts) and to the right is the tag/card version of the character as it would appear after cutting. The Kanji alone gives you a convenient one part item to add to your layout, the card/tag option of the character cuts in two parts and has more definition that way, even if the differences are just subtle. If you add the card option of the character to your card front, just select the surrounding border and do a "hide selected contour" to have it not cut, I also hide the score marks in the center of the card....
The resulting window card can be finished in many ways, I used some hand made paper inside the card and added a touch of eyelash yarn and some pierced holes at the top:



These designs look very cool with mulberry paper or patterned designer paper behind them!

Browsing around on my cartridges I found this pretty heart on the Home Decor one! And what do you know, a very nice "love" script as well. Shrinking the word a bit sideways I welded it into the heart. Made a duplicate of this for a shadow and got a pretty quick card out of this!

This is my entry for the current Just Buggin' Love Ya Challenge .

card size: 6 by 5.5
papers: assorted shimmer and linen papers
cartridge: Home Decor
get .cut file

Now how do you make yourself a custom shadow like that in design studio?
Very easy: Line up and weld your items on the first page.
Use the shadow function and same slider size and add both items again.
Now move them behind the original to see how the shadow fits.
The heart was easy as I had not changed this, but put it exactly behind the original cut the way you want the shadow to appear.
Now the "love" text I had manipulated so it took a little while of shifting and adjusting the width until it fit properly as a shadow.
You are still working on the first page in DS!
When you are happy with it all, open a second page.
Select the heart by clicking on it, copy (ctrl C), then go to your second page and paste. DO NOT MOVE THIS! It will paste exactly to the same position as it was copied from the first page.
Go back and copy your second item (text), and paste it to your second page. It will copy exactly at the same spot that you had it on your first page. Select weld on both items. Go back to first page again and select your shadow items and delete them.

So, in other words, in order to make a shadow of welded items in design studio, you arrange your shadow items right on top of your original items on page 1 until you are happy with their size. Then just copy all welded items to a second page and paste them there without moving. Go back to your first page and delete them there.

In one of my ATC swap groups we have a fabulous birthday coming up. I really wanted to sit this amazing number into something else, and here is what I came up with:

I took the banner heart from the Lovestruck cart and sat the "90" (storybook) in the center of the banner, welded. This layer was cut from Dragonfly Dreams Shimmer Paper which takes the intricate cuts very well without tearing.

The base card was made with the blackout key for the same heart. I adjusted the width and height a bit so that it would fit properly in a A6 envelope. At the beginning of this blog I showed you how to make shaped cards that are side-fold. The top-fold cards are a lot easier to do, here are the steps:

1. choose your shape and put on bottom half of DS screen
2. select item, then copy (ctrl C) and paste (ctrl V) (don't move it!!) it is exactly on top of your initial shape
3. rotate new shape 90 degrees twice
4. move new shape up on vertical axis only until you have desired overlap at fold
5. important: FLIP new shape. Most cricut shapes are not exactly bilaterally even, so this step is important for the front and back of the card to match

Click here to download the .cut file

I put the top cut directly onto the top-fold card which was cut from a DECVW designer card stock that has little shimmer dots all over. Colored the heart part with a violet copic marker. This bled through, so I had to get a bit creative on the inside:

I really love the way the copic looks on the inside, with the dot pattern and entire shape looking a lot like done in watercolor. All stamps used on the inside are from Mark's Finest Papers .