Looks like Fun!

decorating with my daughter

My daughter loves to decorate cakes (and cupcakes) and today we decided to do a project together. I was messing around in the Cricut Craft Room while Emily was adding fondant to a small square cake. We soon hooked the computer up to the Cricut Cake mini and began cutting on some candy clay.

I was inspired to try the candy clay after a post on the Cricut Circle blog by Cindy where she shared decorating cookies with candy clay. I learned quite a lot today while working with the candy clay...use lots of powder sugar to thicken it, at least on a warm summer day. We took to freezing the clay on the mats before cutting then freezing after cutting and freezing after removing the extra material around the cuts. And work fast to transfer the images. The cuts were from Create a Critter (sun shape) and Cricut Decals (scuba diver) and Crciut Craftroom Basics (letters FUN) I used the hide contour tool on the scuba diver to remove some of the finer details knowing it would be impossible to maintain the cuts with the candy clay, in fact we had to reattach the arms because they were so skinny they wouldn't stay connected!

Over all I am quite pleased with my first use of candy clay and DD (darling daughter), Emily added her piped frosting for a nice finished touch!

Happy B-Day USA

I wanted to make some fun jewelery to wear to my SIL's 4th of July party so I pulled out some printable shrink plastic, turned on the Imagine and started designing on my gypsy. I used three stars in two sizes (3" and 4.5") and the buccaneer Imagine cartridge for some patterns - blue stripes and red polka dots. I fill each star with pattern, the 3" with blue stripes and the center 4.5" with the red dots. Cut the shrink plastic used my crop-a-dile to make holes in the arms of the stars for jump rings then used my embossing heat gun to shrink. The stars shrunk to about 1" and 2". I used some large gold colored jump rings my DD had in her stash of beading materials, along with a few gold colored beads for a little extra flair. I wanted the necklace to be "light" in that the focus would be on the stars and stripes in honor of Independence day - Happy Birthday to the United States!!

I didn't have any chain to attach my star "charms" but I had some pretty gauzy-type ribbon that was just right for the look I was attempting. In all I like the necklace, it was a fun project to have something festive for the fun day. This is the first time I have used printable shrink plastic and was very happy with the results. The only thing I need to adjust is the depth of cutting, perhaps use multi-cut for a better cut.

Another circle weekly challenge

This week's challenge was to use a sun cut out and the word summer in the project. I used the gypsy wanderings sun and used my gypsy to hide the inside swirl to the sun so it was a solid image. I used the sun image three times, one for the background of a second one for journalling. I also used the sun with the number 17 (numbers cut from Cricut Alphabet) to indicate the birthday year. My youngest son has a summer birthday - in fact, it is on the first day of summer! Last year I snapped the photos of our celebration and the happy feeling of them gave me the idea to say "summer birthday's rock" The only bummer of the layout is that I don't have DD in the pics because she was working at the time of the party. The word summer was cut from Stretch Your Imagination and the border on the top left photo is from Paper Trimmings (two images welded together). The chipboard letters and all the paper are by PiggyTales.

Dress your bug

The magazine challenge for the Cricut Circle is to dress up one or more of the little collectible guys. I have two of the buggers, blue for the Expression and red for the Cake. I also have two sons(18 yrs., and 21 yrs.) and they are both planning on joining the Army. To honor my boys, I decided to dress my little Cricut figures as Army dudes and the first item to make was the "brain bucket" helmet. Most cuts are from the Stand and Salute cart. The dog tags used for the banner on the truck were done with the gypsy, I hide the image on the dog tag then added the font from Cake Basics. The patriotic hat is from Over the Hill cart, cut with white card stock and then I colored it with ink (red-festive berries,TH, and the blue LePlume marker). The truck is cut from some adhesive backed 12" x 24" paper from DCWV and the canvas layer (light brown) is paper from my scrap stash. The weapon in the red bug's hands is also cut from the DCWV dark brown card stock. The camo background paper are two pages I have waiting to use in DH's Army scrapbook that I have horded for a few years, hummm maybe I'll just save it now for the boys!

Billy the Kid layout

The circle monthly challenge is to do a layout of a recent event...well without a specific definition for recent I decided to do my son's 3rd birthday...it sure seems like only a few months ago he celebrated his 3rd birthday! The journal writing on the page tells the story of how he felt when being called "cowboy" during the family party. It was fun the first 5 minutes but then he wasn't sure if people knew who he really was...so after Grandma Barb (the gift giver of the cowboy get up) called him cowboy (the umpteenth person to do so!), he said in no uncertain terms - "I'm Billy -- the kid!"

So what did I use for the layout... lots of scraps and the back ground paper is from crate paper and I splattered it with Adirondack color wash - Espresso. The cuts I did on my Cricut E2. "Billy" and "the" are from the Making the Grade cart, "Kid" is cut from Old West as well as the cowboy hat and bandana. I jazzed up the cowboy hat with Viva pearl pen -chrome silver. The white accents on the cuts are with the white gelly roll pen and the journal-ling was written with Bic Mark-It ultra fine - woodsy brown (love my set of Bic mark-it pens I won from Joy's Life - thanks again Joy!!) The journal-ling block is border punched with Fiskars border punch, notebook.

My Cat in the Hat

I just purchased the Over the Hill cartridge and when I saw the top hat (3-D!) I just had to make it. I played around with some cheap white card stock and it took me three hats to finally get it right...of course each hat was a different size so I could get a feel for the ratio to finished size. While working in my nice cool basement crafting cave, my attention starved (not!) cat had to visit. I decided to make her a special napping place while in the craft cave, in hopes it will save my projects from her furry fluff sticking to the adhesives. She adored her blanket lined crate and I just couldn't resit putting one of my sample hats on her head. Of course the first thing to pop into my head...The Cat in the Hat!