Monday, March 30, 2009

Back to Scrappin'

Ok so I've been on a bit of sabbatical with my scrapping projects. I think I've been in sort of a winter fog/funk and the sunshine and somewhat Spring-like weather has given me energy and made me want to get back to it!

So here are a few projects I've done recently & I hope to be posting many more in the weeks to come!

VERY SIMPLE SPRING BOUQUETS:
(This is a little project I posted on the Cricut message boards & it became a featured post in the Chirp Newsletter! 15k hits! Wow that's never happened to me, it was so much fun!)


Here is the info from my message board post in early March:

My husband's immediate family gets together every month to have dinner together and celebrate any birthdays, anniversaries etc for the month. Buying birthday gifts for all the adults is just too expensive (there's only 4 kids so that's still manageable) so I decided this year that I was just going to start dressing up candy to give away. It's the thought and effort that counts imo anyway. So I wanted to do some quick candy bouquets but didn't have time to get valentine themed items for February before they were all gone. By the time I went to the store they only had Easter stuff so I went with a springy look.

It's a little early but they loved them so oh well haha. I used m&m's in these little .97 vases from walmart and hershey kisses in the centers of the flowers. I had to put these together on the fly so I didn't get to do alot of details.

I used the Accent Essentials cartridge for the flowers. AE is my 'go to' cartridge and my most used, hands down. I used the shadow feature for the bottom layer of the flower (what appears to be the outline) and then made the same cut again, in a different color of paper, using the same size selection, but without the "shadow" feature being selected. I believe that I cut the bigger flowers at 4 inches and the smaller at 3.... but I can't remember for sure. I put the inner layers of all the flowers through my cuttlebug, using the swiss dots folder and it gave them a nice little touch.

I just used wooden skewers from the grocery store for the stems. I have seen other bouquets using straws or paper wrapped wire stems from the floral department, but I personally felt like skewers would stand up the strongest in the m&m's. I used hot glue to adhere the flowers to the skewers (I prefer hot glue as other adhesives don't always stand the test of time + gravity with the weight of the kisses). After the hot glue had cooled, I adhered the kisses to the fronts of the flowers with large, flat, glue dots. I cut the stems down to accomplish the different heights and arranged the flowers in my m&m's.

These are genuinely very simple and easy to make. I made these four in about 30 mins.

ALTERED NOTEBOOKS:

(This was another little project that I posted on the message boards. Here is all the info from that post.)

I was given these altered post-it notes by a friend:


I loved the concept of the velcro dots and decided to take to a slightly bigger level. My mom needed some cute altered notebooks to give to some colleagues at a conference so this is what I came up with. I bought miniature legal pads at Walmart (3 to a pack for a little under $3).

I made a larger pattern for the cover. For the center, I cut out a chipboard shape, then covered with paper and stamping/inking and attached with pop dots on one side a velcro dot on the other.

ALTERED COOKIE SHEET:

I recently learned about altering cooking sheets to use as magnetic boards in the kitchen. This is the first one I did. It was fun and insanely easy. I bought a 3 pack of cookie sheets from Walmart for only $3. I based the colors off of the cute brown and pink ribbon that I found and it took off from there. I bought simple round magnets and decorated those up to match. These are SO fun and make GREAT inexpensive gifts!