SOC Christmas in July Blog Hop

 
Welcome to SOC's Christmas in July Blog Hop! I, along with some very talented crafters, are coming together to deck the halls by sharing Christmas themed projects! Of course Christmas is the season for giving, and this hop is no exception! There will be giveaways on various blogs throughout the hop! Plus, there will be an SOC blog hop gift awaiting one visitor!! To be eligible for that prize, you must comment on all the blogs by Sunday, July 28th at 11:00pm EST. From all who are eligible, one lucky reader will be randomly drawn. The winner will be posted on all the participating blogs on Wed, July 31st.

Dorothy here

Cyndi

Cheryl

Donna

Francine

Debra

Alice

Michelle

Classygirl

MJ

 





Double layout

 



1st layout

 

 2nd layout

 Close up of the title enhanced with Glossy Accents

 



Close up of the sentiment enhanced with Glossy Accents 

Close up of mats for 3 X 5 photos and the tree for journaling

 

 

 Close up of the embossed flocked tree and the stickled  star

Close up of the snow

 The papers used are DCWV Christmas Combo 2010 for the snowflake mat,  photo mats for 3 X 5 pictures, tree journaling space, and the large  trees. Other papers used are Sizzix Textures Handmade Paper for the tree trunks and Wausau for the snow. The red cardstock is AC Cardstock.

 

Using the Gypsy and Cricut Expression the following Cricut cartridges were used Paper Doll Dress Up(large trees), Joys of the Season(star and sentiment), George(photo mats), Create A Critter(journaling tree), Lacy Labels(mat behind Joy) and Teresa Collins December 25th(title).

 

The large trees were embossed with the Vagabond using the Sizzix Evergreen embossing folder.

 

Other items and tools used were the Perfect Tears(snow), WRMK(little white snowflakes), Stickles(star and flower), Colorbox Chalk Warm Red(mats), EK Success Chalk(snow), Stampendous Cotton Ball White Flock(large trees),  and Spellbinders Large Labels(behind title). And the adhesives used were Glossy Accents, ATG, GlueDots and Zig 2 Way.

 

 

Slice of Cake Birthday Card

Today is my grandson Thaddeus' 19th birthday. One of the things he loves is chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, matter of fact that is my favorite cake as well. The perfect slice of cake is found on the From My Kitchen cartridge. Using the Provocraft Gypsy and Baby Bug I was able to make him the perfect birthday card ( 6 1/4 X 5 1/4).

Cardstock: DCWV; A C Cardstock ( cake),  Paper: K & Company(red), Embossing: Cuttlebug Happy Birthday, Provocraft cartridges: From My Kitchen and Birthday Cakes, Hemp, Adhesives: Rangers Glossy Accents; ATG; Zig 2 Way; Popups, Punch: Fiskars, Martha Steward Scoreboard

Anniversary Card

This is a trifold card I made for my son and his wife for their 4th anniversary. For their wedding the maid of honor wore gold and the bridesmaids wore red. The card was designed using the Gypsy hand-held machine.

Trifold card was cut  using the Cricut Wild Card cartridge. The number 4 and the letters were cut using the Cricut Storybook cartridge. And the pointed square was cut using the Cricut Gypsy Wanderings cartridge. The pointed square was embossed using the Cuttlebug machine with Cuttlebug Kassie's Brocade embossing folder. Number 4 and the letters were embossed with the Cuttlebug Swiss Dots embossing folder. The Autumn Leaves fabric flower was embellished with Rangers Icicles Stickles.

Martha Stewart Floral Vine border punch was used to decorate K & Company cardstock. Rangers Distress Fired Brick ink was used to ink the edges of the pointed squares and for the Fiskars stamped sentiment.

 

Cardstock: K & Company, The Paper Company

Adhesives: Popdots, Gluedots, Glide Pro

Cricut V1machine and 6 X 12 mat

Teaching a Daughter to Use the Cricut Expression and the Gypsy

A couple of weeks ago my daughter Deborah came for a long weekend visit. When she saw all the scrapbooking equipment and supplies I own, she wanted to learn how to use them. First she wanted to decorate her new netbook with vinyl cutouts. I had never used vinyl myself, even though I had recently bought two colors and transfer tape. With the help of the Gypsy using Birthday Cakes, Animal  Kingdom and Printing 101 cartridges she was able to nicely decorate her netbook. I must say the use of vinyl is very easy.

After decorating the netbook she was all excited, giggly and still feeling very crafty, so I suggested she make a card for one of her nephews whose birthday was coming up. Once again she used the Cricut Expression and Gypsy, but she also added learning how to use the Cuttlebug with Swiss dots and Spots & Dots folders. With the  Gypsy using the Birthday Cakes and George & Basic Shapes Cartridge she learned how to flip one of the dinosaur pieces and how to weld a rectangle from George between the feet of the two pieces. She learned how to score the rectangle using the Martha Stewart Scoreboard. The grass with cattails used was from Paper Dolls for Everyday. The Happy Birthday with balloons and number 8 were from Birthday Cakes. Marcus was from Cuttin' Up. The cardstock used is AC Cardstock. The card is  5.7 wide and 4.32 high. A 6X6 envelope was made using the Martha Stewart scoreboard. Adhesives used were Zig 2-way and Glue Dots. White gel pen and Zig red pen were used for the mouth.

Anniversary Card

My oldest daughter and her husband will be celebrating their 25th wedding anniversay in early August. The wedding colors were lavender, so the card is shades of purple. I used the Gypsy to design the card, the Original Cricut to cut all the pieces and the Cuttlebug for embossing
Cricut Cartridges: Wild Card-Card

                            Sweethearts-Bells

                            Elegant Cakes-Wishes, Happy Anniversary, 25

                            George and Basic Shapes-Frame base

Cuttlebug folder:Victoria

Cardstock:Wausau Classics

Vellum:Emagination

Sentiments:Linda LaTourelle

Font:Monotype Corsiva

Punches:Martha Stewart Optic dot border and corner

Adhesive:Zig 2-Way, Glue Dots

Ribbon

Front of Card

Inside of Card

Closeup of Front

Closeup of Front

Sentiment on Card

                                            

Decorating Books For Faithbooking

The second Saturday in April Tammy Skinner introduced Faithbooking to the blog followers on Cuttlebug Challenge. You might wonder what is Faithbooking , well to quote Tammy it is as follows: What is scrapbooking? Everyone knows that one, right? It's the preservation of our memories for generations to come.Well, that is exactly what faithbooking is too. That and so much more. In faithbooking, not only are you preserving  those memories...but you are sharing a piece of your spirit with your future generations.

I found this very inspiring. So the next day, I headed to Michaels to buy a $1.00 journal and a $5.99 album. Yesterday I did a little decorating of the books, so I would be ready for the next in series of lessons tomorrow. The album is a Recollections Damask. I did the designing using the Gypsy and  Lyrical Letters for the word saying as well as the butterflies. They were all cut using the Original cricut. Paper: DCWV Pastel with white core and AC Cardstock. The ribbons are Sugar n' Spice(butterflies) and Bobbin(Blessings). Embossing was done using the Cuttlebug and Divine Swirls folder. The embossing was sanded with a MM fine sanding block.

April Showers

Today's blog is the fulfillment for the Monday challenge on the blog Fantabulouscricut. It took me some time to get the layout done, but it allowed me to use some of the supplies I have had for years, such as chalk and rubons. As I was doing this layout, I learned a few things along the way. I had designed the layout using Design Studio one evening while watching TV. Yes, I'm usually on the laptop while I watch TV. You know killing two birds with one stone thingy. I learned how to do welding on the Design Studio. Yesterday I learned how to transfer the file from Design Studio to the Gypsy. The other thing I learned on the Gypsy was how to identify the thing on your layout design that doesn't have a downloaded cartridge.  I used the Cricut Expression and cut out  all the shapes from one layout. This layout has also been linked to another blog challenge at Cricutters Anonymous.

Cartridges: A Child's Year(Umbrella)
                  Lyrical Letters(Butterfly)
                  Indie Art(rain)
                  Going Places(cloud)
                  Songbird(Title)

Supplies: Cardstock and paper-Bazzill, AC Cardstock, DCWV(At Home-umbrella, Flower Shower-Title), Wausau, daisyds; Rubons Anna Griffin and Little Yellow Bicycle; Fiskar punch; Ranger Ink(Tea Dye); Chalk and Ribbon.

Paper Flowers

Yesterday I decided to try and design a flower layout using the Gypsy, Gypsy Wanderings cartridge and the Cricut Expression. Though simple here are my results.

I used the 12X12 mat format and Gypsy Wanderings cartridge (key 3, Tag Shadow) to layout one Scalloped circle set at 4.17 inch width, two set at 3 inch width and 3 set at 2 inch width. As you can see I repeated this design, because I wanted to use two different colors of paper. I use a business card holder that I bought at Staples as a stand for the Gypsy.

I placed the two cardstock colors side by side on the 12X12 mat.  Because I did not decide to write a blog about this until this morning I can't show you the cutout pieces on the mat, but I can show you the negative.

My pretty blue Expression settings were as follows: Speed at 4, Pressure at 4 and Blade at 4. After it had finished cutting the first time, I told the Gypsy to repeat the design to make sure it had thoroughly cut the cardstock I used.

I inked both sides of each cut out piece than I crumpled them a bit. To assemble I laid the pieces on top of each other and using a piercing tool made a hole through the layers. Than I finished the flower by fastening the layers with a flower brad.

Supplies used are as follows: AC Cardstock Christmas; AC Cardstock Neutrals; Ranger Distress Ink Tea Dye and Fired Brick. I'm not sure of the brand name for the flower brads used.

Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking is a hobby I started doing about seven years ago in the new format of decorative papers and embellishment. Now I had done what was known as a scrapbook when I was in high school back in the 1950s. In it are pictures of school events, moviestar photos I liked from magazines, party favors, and quotes I like from newspaper and magazine articles.

At that time it was very inexpensive. You just bought an album that said SCRAPBOOK on the front cover and you used photo corners or tape to adhere things to the pages. Now as I look through that book,some of the photo corners have come off and the tape has turned brown and in some places have completely lost it's adherence to the picture and page. Oh well, we did not know any better back then. Than of course we followed that with  photo albums the pages had a stick surface and plastic protective covering a BIG mistake over time. Now people are trying to remove their precious pictures from those albums to save them in a more acid free condition.

Today scrapbooking is a whole new thing. Hopefully you buy everything that is acid and lignin free, so thing will withstand the test of time. Among the many things you might buy will be post, strap bound or 3-ring albums. Than you preceed to buy the following: cardstock and printed paper; chipboard letter and shapes; paper trimmers and  scissors; adhesives; inks, paints or chalks; stickers; embellishments of all sorts; diecutting machines(manual or electric); cartridges and dies for those diecutting machines; and numerous tools.

The next thing you know you now need a room to store all this stuff and a place to work on your beautiful layouts. Layout is what the page with your pictures and embellishments is now called. At the moment I have all the stuff I have bought distributed among three rooms in my house. Last week I started organizing all the stuff I had accumulated over the past seven years. Some of it I have never used. I think I could open my own store and still have stuff left over (only kidding!). After sorting through some of the stuff, it required going out and buying some containers to store it all in an orderly and usuable fashion. It was interesting to rediscover some of the things I have. Amazingly I only found two duplicates; one is a Cricut spatula and the other is Sizzix Sidekick. Eventually, I hope to have it all in one room probably the library.

How I Started Scrapbooking

Seven years ago I was flying down to Virginia for my granddaughter's eighth birthday. Her mother had been scrapbooking for years using Creative Memories products and I admired what she had done. She told me there was a store near them that was totally a scrap book store. And she was signing us up for a crop. Now I had no idea what a crop was. Clueless!  She told me to bring some pictures, but I forgot them. That evening we went to the store. My daughter opened the trunk of her car and started pulling out several black bags. There were other women doing the same thing. Now I was curious as to what was in all these bags. Once we were in the store there were a group of happy and cheery women in a workroom with all their paraphanalia. WOW!

At this point my daughter asks me where are my pictures. I say they are back in Connecticut. So while she went about scrapping during the evening, she told me I could help her select some paper. Walking around the store and seeing all the different things I became interested in some printed paper that had a travel theme and thought they would be perfect for the pictures I had taken in Paris, France. I thought it would be best to start out small, so I bought an 8X8 album, cardstock, printed paper, glue, pens and stickers. My daughter bought me a Fiskars paper trimmmer that I still use today. She later bought me the Xyron 900 Adhesive machine, which is my favorite form of adhesive.

That was the beginning of something I love doing. Sometimes, I think I love buying all the tools even more than using them. My first diecut machine was the big red Sizzix and shape dies to go with it, than the Sizzix Sidekick and sizzlet alphabets and shapes, also Sizzix embossing folders. I followed that with the original Cricut four years ago; got the Design studio about nine months ago; the Gypsy when it launched at the end of September and just bought the Cricut Expression in February. My cartridge collection has now increased to thirty-six plus two coming in the mail anytime now. And like many people I am waiting patiently for Picturesque to be released to everyone. Needless to say I have lots of cardstock, printed paper and embellishments.

I still do more shopping than scrapping. But, I have fun and very much enjoy attending weekend scrap retreat a couple of times a year. Later I will write about the one I will be attending in May.