for a long time I have been looking for a lilac die that I could use to make things for my mother because the lilac is her favorite. So when I saw this Sheena Douglass set on HSN I had to order it and give it a try.

I have never used perfect partners or companions stamps and dies before so off to the crafter's companion web site i went because there are no instructions included. 

I have a bigshot so to cut out the images the web site said I should build my sandwich as follows to cut.    1) multi purpose platform ( all tabs)

          2) cutting mat

          3) die

          4) card stock 

          5) cutting mat 

The first thing I noticed is that if I am only doing one layer of paper the die gets stuck in the cutting plate. I can cut up to 3 layers of card stock to prevent this from happening and that will make things go much faster too. I cut 3 different shades of purple for my first branch. I then inked the lighter shade on the edges and cupped the flowers up with the a ball shaping tool and glued them onto the branch. I found that my wax pen works great for picking up those little flowers.

I then made a twisted easel card

this is just a 10inch by 5 in card scored at 5inches the diagonally from top corner to middle corner

 
          fold on score lines

I cut out 2 scalloped circles 1 @ 5.5 and one at 5inches
and a triangle 6.5 x 4.5 and a 4.5 inch square

I painted all the smaller pieces and outlined the larger ones with black marker, added a butterfly from crafter's companion butterfly dimensional set which I painted with metallic acrylics, added my lilacs and this is what I ended up with 

                closed

It was a lot of fun and I like the way it came out. I will be doing more of these for sure.

paper flower arrangements

Spring is taking forever to get here this year. So lately I have been working on paper flower arrangements. The more I do them the more I enjoy it! I even got a few orders for Easter and a few more for mothers day. I love making these and it was a boost to my ego that people would pay me to do something I love. Here are a few of my first attempts.

shadowbox card

Here is another shadowbox I made, I am really getting into making these, they are so much fun and with cricut design space you can upload any non copyrighted object to put in it. I used a unicorn silhouette that I found in a quick google search. I uploaded it to ds and the weeded out the back ground. To make the second unicorn I just mirror imaged the first and flipped it around. easy peasy :D Give it a try... here is the link to a square frame shadowbox I made. Please share what you make with it, I would love to see!

fairy shadow box card

Today I was playing in design space and put together this cute little shadow box card. My favorite thing about design space has to be how all of my images are at my fingertips so I can mix ans match. The fairies for this card came from Denise's scrapbooking room and can be found here. The flowers and vine are from the Art Nouveau cartridge which I bought years ago when it first came out and use all the time ( I love the fonts). I got the mason jar from SVGcuts and it can be found here. I designed the box itself from basic shapes and eyeballed the score lines. As i was working on this one the ideas were flooding in, the possibilities are endless.

Diaper cakes

Today I made my first castle diaper cakes. They use 70 diapers, I used both newborn and size one but they could have been any size. This was a fun project that went together easily and no baby shower is complete without a diaper cake!

These are just the basic cakes, I will re-post next week when I have added all the cuteness to them :)

3D babybottle

               Today I made this 3D baby bottle from the Tiny Miracle SVG Kit. It was a fun project. The only problem that I found was that Mary in the tutorial is so awesome that she makes it look so easy and makes me feel like I have 11 fingers while gluing, hehehe. She uses scotch adhesive and I found that the Aleene's original tacky glue worked better for me. This was a fun project and I will definitely make more of them. I am going to use them as center pieces for baby shower decorations and fill them with candy. they can be used as prizes for the games at the shower.

 

Crib Box Card for Baby

I have several friends who are having babies so today I am working on cards for them. I bought this super cute file from SVG cuts.

 I had never worked with their files before but they had a great tutorial video and the pdf that came with the file was helpful. Because I am new to cricut design space it did take me some time to figure out that I had to attach the score lines to the card to get them to cut but I love the way it came out. I did change a couple things on this one, I used an owl from the CTMH artbooking cartridge instead of the teddy bear because she is doing an owl theme. I also left out the blocks that spelled out BABY because I could not get the Y to cut without tearing. I cut the safety pin off the front and used it on the back along with the booties.

this is the back. 

I ended up getting carried away and made 4 of them

here is a closer look at the boy one

I was still having trouble with the Y on the blocks but really wanted to add it, so edited the blocks to write in design space instead of cut and then I colored them in and fussy cut them out.

I am happy with the way they turned out.