Crafting Days: Happy birthday cards

Last Thursday, I made two birthday cards for two special people who had birthdays within days of each other. Both cards were inspired by others on pinterest but for the most part it was my own design.

The first card belongs to my lovely cousin who is very talented in baking and cooking in general. I made her this cake card which was cut out all using the silhouette cameo and then hand glued on.

The second card I went for something bolder and more colorful. It now belongs to my aunt who is very thoughtful and always willing to help. The card that inspired this one was "busier" with more colors but having just the bold pennant banners and washi tape does it for me.

Which one do you like more?

Crafting Days: Butterfly Birthday Card

This card was a little last minute since I made the card a day before giving it to my aunt. I went with a red scheme since you can't go wrong with that color when the recipient is Asian! I searched around on pinterest for some ideas and I combined several to get a similar card.

I absolutely love the fact that I am using up scrap paper, so now I don't feel so wasteful! The pearls on the cards were given to me several years ago and are meant for stringing but anything will stick with a glue gun!

Crafting Days: Cheap DIY Envelopes!

Since I have been making so many cards recently, I wanted to have some envelopes that were not plain white or other solid color. I found online that there are a lot of people who made their own envelopes and had some pretty good tips too!

This way, I have pretty envelopes with different patterns on it with different color schemes!

Materials needed:

• Xacto knife
• envelope template - this can be found online or rip up a store bought one 
• Paper pad - either 8.5x11 or 12x12
• Scoring board

Step 1. Find a large paper pad, I got mine from Michaels for $6.99 at clearance and it had 240 sheets!

Step 2. Find a template online or use a store bought envelope. Using an Xacto knife, cut multiple sheets at once rather than use scissors.

Step 3. Score/fold the sides using a score board. If you don't have one, you can use a ruler and fold the paper over it.

 Step 4. Add glue to the edges and fold the bottom flap over and let dry before use!

Step 5. Rinse and repeat! I have made close to 50 envelopes now, but I use my silhouette cameo to help me cut. Yes, I know I cheated =)

Crafting days: Lord of The Rings inspired birthday party

Two weeks ago I wrote about some citronella candles that I had made for a BBQ get together which had a silhouette of the fellowship glued onto the mason jars. This weeks post is to show off some of the other things I had made which were all related to the best movies ever ;)

Lembas bread: 

Materials used

• Paper
• String
• Sugar cookies from the super market
• Lembas bread leaf wrapper template

I am fully aware that the leaf wrapper looks phallic but we are all adults here! I had cut all of the wrappers by hand after printing out the leaf markings since my silhouette would not have cut that large size. I ended up making 40 of these which didn't take so long.

I could have baked my own cookies for it, but come on, I am no baker! I ended up buying sugar cookies from the super market and it worked out perfectly. The tags were drawn and cut by the silhouette cameo.

Directions and Signs

Materials used

• Paper
• Paint
• cardboard
• Patterned scissors

For the directions, I actually use some old cardboard and since I did not have the right sized paintbrush, I used my finger to write the locations out. To make sure they attached to the pole, I poked some holes and strung some twine and tied it to the pole that was conveniently on the sidewalk.

For the other signs, they were printed and I used patterned scissors to make it look like the edges were torn/tattered. 

Gandalf's fireworks

Materials used

• Paper
• Glue
• CANDY!
• chopsticks 

I was originally going to add more fireworks to the jar but I have to admit that I got lazy and rather than make a lot of fireworks, I added colorful candy aka pixie sticks!

I would say that working on all of these took me about 5-6 hours to do since it was a lot of manual cutting but I think it still came out well and it was worth it to me!