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!

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!