Saturday, December 24, 2011

Odds and Ends with Bags, Tags, and Boxes


This week at work a co-worker pointed out a cute box in a magazine.  We got to talking and I remembered that I had the Bags, Tags, and Boxes Cricut Cartridge. I wanted to see how big of a box I could make sometime during my vacation.  Fast forward a couple days and I needed to wrap a gift card.  I decided to make my own box using the cartridge.  After looking at various boxes, I decided on the crayon box.  I had some heavy green metallic card stock, some green trees I had stamped using Tim Holtz distress inks on water color paper with a few flicks of water, and a piece of ribbon from Bath and Body Works when they gift wrapped something for me last year.  I dug through my scrap drawer and found some red and white scraps of paper.  I cut out my box at 8 3/4 inch.  I used some adhesive to put it together, wrapped the ribbon around the box and framed my stamped image of an evergreen tree.  I popped my tree up with some foam adhesive. I was happy this turned out to be fairly masculine, because the gift card is for a male.
I also knew that at Fantabulous Cricut they issued a challenge to trim with a tag in this week's project.  I used some of the same green cardstock to cut out a tag on my Cricut.  I trimmed the bottom of the tag and rounded the edges with a corner rounder from Stampin' Up! Next, I used some scrap paper and some seasonal Tim Holtz ink to stamp my message on my tag.  I added a little green gem to the corner of the stamped image.  I finished the tag off with my coordinating ribbon. Voila, a gift box and tag!

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Scraptastic Holiday Cards!

I have been feeling the need to bust out my Cricut and make something fantastic.  I have been prepping for card classes and a scrapbook class coming up at Artsy, but haven't spent a ton of time in my own craft room.  I even took a two part 12 Tags of Christmas class - which was so much fun!  Anyway, I decided I needed to break out my own tools and get to work crafting.  I didn't have time to run to the store or even grab some coordinating papers, so focused on using scraps.  Fortunately, I had a couple pieces of paper I had purchased at a crop a few months ago that kind of coordinated.
I started by cutting out a tree using the Create A Critter cartridge, my tree was kind of plain, so I used Perfect Pearls Mists in perfect pewter to add some sparkle.  I continued to cut out strings of lights to piece together, then cut apart to dress up my tree.  I used dark brown distress ink to color the trunk and added a touch of fluffy white snow.
I topped the tree off with an over-sized Jolee's gem.  I didn't have a paper to back my tree with that matched...so I had to make my own.  I created a mosaic with little extra pieces of paper that I had used to cut out the lights for the tree.  I also cut out the word, "joy".  I had to spray this with glimmery mist too! I backed the cards in pink and added my ribbon.

Voila', a fun and bright holiday card!