Crafting Days!: A big happy birthday card!

Last week my husband turned 30 so for the big occasion I decided to make the biggest card I have ever made! Sorry for the lack of pictures, I was making this card while I had a fever so most of it was rushed.

This card is made using two 8.5x11 pieces of card stock joined together with a strip. I had cut a bunch of balloons and bought bakers twine to use as the string. Rather than glue all of the string to the paper, I just let it hang off of the card. This card was actually not my design but rather it was found on pinterest so I can't really take credit for it =).

The only thing that made it mine was the fact that I wrote a nice little note (not pictured) for my husband. Hey, sometimes someone else will have the perfect idea out there for you. No need to reinvent the wheel!

Crafting Days! : Citronella candles

This past weekend we had a BBQ get together and I decided last minute to add some Lord of The Rings inspired decorations. I will feature some of the other things at another time but this blog post will only be about the candles that I made.

A few years back, I bought a candle making kit from Michaels and never really found the time to use it. It included two pounds of wax, coloring, wick, and a mold. I think I waited because I never really found out where to buy Citronella oil until last week. I bought the citronella oil from the Vitamin Shoppe and at first I was afraid it wouldn't work but after lighting them up, most of the mosquitoes stopped biting!

To make sure that the candles fit the theme, I cut a silhouette out of paper of the fellowship and used mod podge to glue it onto mason jars. The jars were from a wedding that I went to a year ago. Yay for recycling!! Honestly, DIY candles are REALLY easy! Just make sure you have a pot or a glass measuring cup that you don't mind melting wax in.

Instructions:

Step 1 : Melt wax in a double boiler/mixing bowl/old pot, melt wax until it is 200 degrees Fahrenheit



Step 2: While the wax is melting, prepare your candle holder by adding a wick. I used mason jars and tied the wick to a chopstick.

Step 3. After the wax has melted and has reached the right temp, remove from the heat source and stir in citronella oil. Roughly 3 drops per cup of wax is recommended.

Step 4. Pour wax into the vessels and let cool!

Crafting Days! : Charlie Brown and Snoopy birthday card

So I have a friend who absolutely loves Snoopy and I wanted to make a card for her birthday this past week. I was originally thinking of making a card I had found on pinterest with flowers made from heart cutouts but I like it when cards are more personalized.

In the end, I decided to combine the two and cut out a silhouette of Charlie Brown and Snoopy sitting next to each other with a 3D flower right next to it. The middle is a pearl bead I had from my sewing supplies. I guess it's a good thing I hoard craft things!

Crafting Days!: From drawing to real life card!

I was approached by a good friend at work to create a custom card for her boyfriend's birthday a few weeks ago. She wanted to give him something special and rather than buy a card from a store, she wanted to make it more personalized by designing it herself.

She absolutely loves penguins and both her and her boyfriend share an entire family of stuffed penguin dolls so she based her design off of one of the newest additions. She first drew the penguin and asked if it could be done. Liking the challenge, I agreed to help her and I am glad it did because the card is super cute!

At first, I didn't know whether or not I should redraw the image in Photoshop and then transfer it over to the Silhouette Cameo design software to trace and cut. Then I thought to myself "why not just take a picture?".

I quickly took a picture of the drawing and transferred it straight into Silhouette studio and traced it using the circle tool as shown below.

I then used the wield tool to combine all of the shapes to form the shape of the body. The hardest part was definitely the eyes since they were curved and I had to manually move the lines to match. I was also worried that I wouldn't be able to fit it into one sheet of paper which would make assembling easier but after some rotating it did!

Standing at about 6.5inches tall, here is the final result!