SVG Cuts Spring Contest: Bird Bath

Well butter me up, 'cause I'm on a roll!

I'm posting twice in one weekend, wow, I never get the chance to be so on the ball!

Before I get to my project, I wanted to share what Spring looks like in my part of the world...beautiful sunny Florida!

Ok, so today's project is my entry for SVG Cuts Spring Challenge. It's hard to come up with something that someone hasn't already made, and so far I don't think anyone made a bird bath. 

Look at the cute blue bird family taking a swim!

Bet you are wondering how I made this, and which kits I used.

Well one kit is obvious, the birds and flowers with vines are from the Spring Birdhouses kit.

The bath is made from the bottom of the 3-D egg (bottom half) and and base the is made from the pedestal from the Poplar Street Tulips kit.

And the yellow flowers on the bath are from the 3-D Mums and Fall Flowers kit.

To create the "water" I painted the bottom inside half of the bird bath blue, then I enlarged the octogon piece that is also on the bottom part of the "egg" aka bird bath and cut it out on clear plastic that I got in a pad at Michaels called Grafix Clear Craft Plastic.

To make the water sparkle and look like it had ripples, I used star dust Stickles.

I also used some Posy twine from Trendy Twine to wrap around the base of the yellow flowers.

I just love the look of the "water" with the ripples!

That's all for now folks, off to work on another project ;) Hope you are having a beautiful weekend.

Spring Bridal Shower Banner

Hello Everyone!

I'm really enjoying this wonderful Spring weather, even a few thunderstorms that cool the temperatures are nice.

{As my cat cowers in the kitchen terrified}

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of designing a banner for my friend's bridal shower;

Take a look see...

Supplies that I used:

 Sizzix eclips,

eCAL program, 

Papers from DCWV Rustic Stack,

Trendy Twine,

Basic shapes from my shapes library for the banner and fringe,

Lettering Delights and

SVG Cuts files for details.

Now for some closer pictures to show the details...

I used my fonts, to create the words and then added a shadow layer in my eCAL program.

The flowers below are from SVG Cuts Happy Birthday to You kit.

The butterfly is from Lettering Delights Blossoms and Butterflies set.

The twine, is Trendy Twine's Posy, that I used to tie all of the banner pieces together. 

One last detail that I added was embossing on the letters to give them some intrest and dimension.

I hope you are having a wonderful Spring season as well; enjoy it while it lasts!



SVG Attic's March Blog Contest

This month SVG Attic challenged contestants to use moss green, grey, black and ivory in their submissions.

So this is what I came up with...

The box container is a candy holder that has a dispenser on the bottom from the Fun Favors SVG Collection.

The rounded container is from the set Kiss the Cook, and it holds the little bird house, which is also a candy holder and it is from the set Welcome Spring.

I used Trendy Twine's Posy twine which looks so perfect on Spring projects.

    

 I had to shrink the original size of the birdhouse by about a third to get it to fit in the container.

For some dimension I used a polka dot embossing folder for the roof accents. 

I wanted to have a way for the bird house to hang from the twine on the top of the birdhouse, so I made a hole in the bottom of the container and threaded the twine through. To hang it, I tied a bow, but to get to the candy inside, you just untie the bow, and the lid comes up.

Below is the dispenser in action!

Jessica at SVG Attic has some super crafty SVGs, go check out her store if you haven't already, she releases new files just about every week!

Boy's Birthday Card

So this year for my nephew's birthday card I got my inspiration from The Pirate's of the Caribbean, and decided to make him a pirate themed card along with some pirate accessories such as a Happy Birthday Banner, a treasure chest and some eye patches.

I used SVG Cuts's card base from the Everyday Cards kit and changed the Party card to say Ahoy Birthday Boy.

I used elements from my Lettering Delights kit called Aye Matey and I just love all of the elements that helped make the card look rustic (especially love the compass on the back layer!)

The papers I used are from DCWV Rustic Stack.

I used Trendy Twine's Chocolate Truffle, if you haven't explored twine yet, I think it's such a great trend that has taken over in the paper crafting world!

I used  black  brads to attach the anchors and the twine.

Since I didn't have room to write my message on the card, I created a rustic-map looking page that I folded and unfolded and scrunched until the paper was softer and looked old, I inked the edges and even made a few tears in it to age it. I then wrote my message like a treasure map, with an X at the end of the message. 

I folded up the message and sealed it with red twine added the words Beware in red and a sword.

These are the other elements, the banner, the treasure chest and the eye patches.

If you look closely at the banner you will notice that I embossed it with a polka dot emboss folder.

I used stretchy cord from Stretch Magic for the eye patches. 

Th-th-that's all for now folks!!!

Thanks for peeking into my studio!

P.S.  And Becky at Happy Card Encouragment Factory, this is for you especially since you showed me the sale on the Adobe Elements package:

I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 10.0 {which you can try free for 30 days} to enchance my photos which I just got in the mail earlier last week, squeel :) I played with a few test photos first and then used my favorite techniques to add to these pictures...to show you one of the befores to get an idea, this is an original photo below:

The red background didn't really go with my theme, so I used my magic selection tool to select all of the elements that I wanted in the photo and added them to a gradient background with a texture filter.

Here is another original, and above you will notice that I made it look neat by adding what is called Out of Bounds, which I think looks so cool!

Hope you're having a great day!

Happy Spring!

There's just something so peacful about Spring, the birds start chirping in joy for warmer weather, the air is still fresh, and the trees and grass have the new baby green growth starting to bring life to what was a barren land.  I could do without the pollen though {it's the downside to Spring}.

So with that said, I couldn't resist making a sign to welcome Spring.

I used SVG Cuts star pattern from Made in the USA.

I made the title by welding the shadow layer of the words together in eCAL/SCAL.

To add dimension to the flowers I used Scotch foam tape.

I used Trendy Twine's Strawberry Cupcake in the center and for the star to hang with.

To finish the words and make them stand out, I used Stickles Star Dust.

Hope this gets you in the mood for Spring time fun.

Dragons and Wizard Lantern

So last night my husband says he has a challenge for me...I love it when he says that, because he's really good at giving me ideas, and he lets me run in whatever direction I want to go with it.

First he said he wants me to make a Spring lantern with soft colors and flowers. I knew for sure I could create something for him, but it seemed a little odd that he would have this sort of request. Well before I even picked out the color scheme in my head he said, on second thought, make a lantern with dragons and wizards...something cool!

Ok, now this is much more his style. I was actually excited to start thinking of how I would create this lantern, and I of course used my favorite SVG Cuts Oak Lantern, but I just used the plain lantern and welded in the dragons. 

I'm no expert on creating dragons, so I Googled images for dragons, and when I found one that was black and white and looked cool, I saved the image and opened the image in Inkscape.

Then I clicked on the image and after it was selected, I went to Path and selected Trace Bitmap.

In the Trace Bitmap window I selected update, then pressed OK. At this point weird dots of the image appear in the window and at that point I closed the window and there were two images on my board.

One of them has arrows really close around the image, and the other has arrows further outside of the image. I deleted the one with the arrows further away from this image (the original picture) and what's left is a cleaned up version, which makes it easy to cut from my machine.

The only step left was to save it as an SVG and then I was able to open it in my eCAL program and re-size it to fit in the windows of the lantern.

I added some stars to two of the lantern tops from eCALs library.

For the vellum, I didn't want just plain vellum, I wanted a cool purple/orange color, so I created my own gradient version of purple to orange in Photoshop, then added a crystallized filter.

You can click on the picture and save it, then open it and print onto your 8.5"x11" vellum.

As far as the wizard hat goes, I used SVG Cuts Happy Birthday to You file for the party hat. I used stars from the library to make it look more like a wizards hat. SVG Cuts also has a free party hat on their site as well, but the one in the Happy Birthday set has ruffled edges that I used to glue to the base of the hat. One more note for the hat, I created a circle within a circle for the rim so that you can set the hat right over the top or take it off.

I used 22 gauge floral wire for the  handle and additional decorations (like the wands with paper stars on top). I also dressed up the hat with yellow ribbon and a black buckle.

Thanks for looking at my husband inspired project :)

Hope you're having a wonderful weekend!

Trendy Twine Guest Designer: Valentine's Day Project Ideas

I am so excited to share some crafty Valentine projects featuring Trendy Twine's fabulous twine and SVG Cuts fantastic files.  I was invited to be a guest designer for Trendy Twine (go check them out if you haven't yet), and I'm so thrilled to use their twine on my projects, it gives them that little something they were missing.

I made a two projects, so for starters, I will show you a count down to Valentine's Day calendar. The SVG files are from SVG Cuts.

The twine I used for this project is Valentine Cherry Cupcake and Peppermint Stick.

I used SVG Cuts Classic Christmas Advent Calendar, but ungrouped the files and created my own layout using only 14 of the 24 windows.

The Be Mine Caption is from 24 Valentines.

I mostly used left over pink red and white scraps that I had laying around, but I did use a few papers from K&Company's Geo Floral paper pad and the black and white border is from Me & My Big Ideas black and white speciality cardstock paper pad.

Fun candy surprises inside!

{I added a heart to a tack to dress it up a bit}

I gave this to my husband on February 1st, and he remembered to look for his treat 2 days in a row ;)

For my second project I mad a strawberry teapot, and to dress it up I used Valentine Cherry Cupcake twine wrapped around the handle and for the center of the flower buttons. This is a gift bag, so you can add anything that will fit. the dimensions of the strawberry are about 4.5" high by about 5.5" wide and the bag is 2.5" deep.

I used SVG Cuts Lunch with Mom kit and a freebie caption .

The papers were a mixture of scraps, bazzill (for the red berry) and K&Company's Citronella paper pad.

I used scotch foam tape to add dimension to the flowers.

I just love the color of this twine, it matches so many papers I have.

Here you can see the bag part of the teapot.

Thanks for looking and feel free to leave a comment, I love to get feedback!