My First Diaper Cake - Lil Prince

So this summer I ventured into the fun and fabulous world of Diaper Cakes! I've seen people make these so many times and I finally had not one, but TWO excuses to try them out! I looked up lots of pictures and directions from others and then braved the baby section of walmart for supplies. (Having no children of my own I can confidently say that picking out the diapers was BY FAR the hardest part of this creation -- the sheer volume of options made me dizzy.)

My first diaper cake was for my friend and neighbor April who was having a boy. I really didn't want to do the traditional blue colors so I copied a great idea from the cricut messageboards to do a "little prince" theme using frogs. Green is a great color and it ended up working beautifully on the cake. (I even found green baby wash and matching lotion for the center -- I think it was like a cucumber melon flavor or something like that.)

I used white hair bands to hold the rolled diapers. Most directions called for rubber bands but that seemed 'icky' to me so I ditched that idea.

For cricut users: I used NA for the stork, baby and frogs. Letters are from Pooh Font, the crowns on the frogs are from PD and the grass around the base is from Zoobaloo.

Baby Pooh Diaper Cake - Phases

So this is the 2nd diaper cake I made. It was for a friend of mine having her 2nd girl. I didn't want to do the traditional colors (once again) so I decided to do a Baby Winnie The Pooh theme with yellow and brown. It turned out pretty cute.

On this one, I took pictures of each phase of the cake. When I first went to make a diaper cake, I found lots of pictures of finished cakes and lots of explanations but I'm such a visual person and wished I could have seen it in phases so I knew if I was doing it right.

On the base I attached flower cuts that were folded in half to sort of imitate the frosting edge look of a normal cake. These diaper cakes were both SO much fun to make and SO easy.

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day!!

This year I decided to keep it simple for Mother's Day. My mom is so hard to shop for so I just made her a little customized present. I bought a simple vase from Hobby Lobby and etched Bee images all over it. She likes bees as a symbol and I thought it was cute for something you tend to put flowers in. :) I used the bread tag cut of a bee from Walk In My Garden and etching cream per the instructions on the bottle. It turned out quite nicely.



I made her card with a cute little fairy cut from Hello Kitty Font and a sentiment from Wild Card.



In lieu of a bow, I dressed up her present with paper roses. I got the paper rose idea from the Cricut messageboards (surprise!) and I just LOVE them! These are my interpretation of Susan's design here: http://susanbluerobot.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-make-paper-roses.html. I used the cut seen below from Accent Essentials and incorporated the same method's used on Susan's website.



I made three different sizes and hot glued them together on the top of the package. I also used a few dots of hot glue to keep her card in place with the roses. She loved them.

Graduation Bouquet

My Sister-In-Law graduated from University 2 days ago and I wanted to make her a special little congratulations gift. The flowers were done with Accent Essentials, Kitty Grad from Hello Kitty Greetings & sentiment from Teardrop. She seemed to really like it and I was pleased with how it turned out.

Birthday Bouquet

My Grandma celebrated her 81st birthday on the 30th of April and we had a special surprise party for her. I created this bouquet as a centerpiece for the food buffet and for her to take home afterward.

It was SO much fun to create and I was very pleased with how it turned out. Accent Essentials was used for the flowers, Walk In My Garden for the butterfly, Home Accents for the bird and Zoobaloo for the sentiment. The mixed greenery was from both HA and AE as well. I did the flowers 3D on both sides and blackout backed the non dimensional images so they looked pleasing from all sides.

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!

Summer "You Pick" Swap Challenge #1

I joined a swap on the Cricut message boards for the Summer. You pick a partner from the message boards and you each complete challenges issued by the host and then send them to each other.

Challenge #1 was four Summer themed cards with 3 elements and 3 papers each.

Here are the four I created. TFL!