A few more houses......

Well I decided to try my hand at some larger paper mache houses. These are available at your local craft store. I used PTI's Home Made stamps for the doors, windows etc and some bottle brush trees, K&Co tags, glittered snow flakes, stars and mini candy canes and a little vintage reindeer I had. My studio is covered in glitter. I love the effect but I hate the mess! Yuk! I wanted to get these finished as I am going in for out patient surgery on Monday. I have a partial tear of my right rotator cuff. But I'm hoping to at least get on my blog and Pinterest after the first couple days. Don't know for sure. Have to wait and see. Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. We have much to be thankful for don't we?

Christmas and Cereal???

I bet you're wondering what this post is all about. Well as you can see I have been busy making small christmas garden type houses which have a rather vintage feel and I made them from the cardboard cereal boxes. The houses themselves are made from the small individual serving size cereal box. The corners of the buidings correspond to the folds of the box. If you try this make sure you open them carefully. The roof and other extra pieces are made from full size cereal box chipboard. Here are the patterns and directions: http://www.issuu.com/inspired-ideas/docs/christmas?AID=10752329&PID=3872207&SID=skim1847X546955Xe8230083fd7fcaea3b6d7068c8ed0bc5

This is an online magazine. Just click on and page through. At the end you click on the Index for the patterns which you can print on your copier. You may have to adjust the patterns slightly for your cereal boxes as I found they weren't quite true but no biggie! A little paint, a lot of glitter and some mini trees etc. and you have a little village in no time. Enjoy!

I forgot!!!

I forgot to tell you that the Flower Shoppe cartridge also has ten different shapes of leaves for your flowers. I added a leaf or two to the first flower I showed you in the last post and then made a different flower /center/leaf for the other photo. The white in the center is glue which hadn't dried! Can you tell I get excited over this stuff!! Enjoy!

Don't you love flowers???

Don't you just love flowers? I do and I love making them. This little flower I am holding is from the Cricut cartridge Flower Shoppe. Check out the center! This is why I held it close to the camera for you to see. This cartridge has dozens of flower layers and you can choose how you wish to put your flowers together. The centers are cut then rolled around a dowel or chopstick. Then you glue the layers together. But the fun is choosing how you want the petals to look. This is only one of many combinations. I added a bead for the center and then sprayed with Perfect Pearls Mist in Forever Red (a Ranger product). Click on the picture to see it larger and you'll see the effect of the Mist. And if course you can make them in any size you want. You can use graduated sizes as I did here or you can make many layers of one size for a very full three dimensional flower. This is one cartridge that is going to get a lot of use in my studio. Have a great week everyone.

Punch Tricks

Hi everyone! It's a beautiful fall day here in north east Maryland, sunny and cool! I just got back from a shopping trip to JA's and Mike's and have something really fun to share with you. Martha Stewart has a Christmas deep edge border punch out called Skyland Snowflake. The magic comes in that you can use it for a double edge border punch as well as a single snowflake in addition to being a deep edge punch. I hope the picture demonstrates this.

I began with a strip of paper cut 2 and 1/4 wide and used the punch in the typical way to go down the edge of the strip. That strip is on the far left in the picture. You can actually begin with any width and then trim to exactly 1 and 1/8 from the inside edge of the punched strip to the trimmed edge. I hope that's clear! Then line up the punch along the opposite edge so that the very center mark of the snowflake is lined up with that mark on the punch--this is on the end snowflake and punch again. This will give you your full round center snowflake. Move the strip and do the same again for each complete circle on your strip, however long it is. If it doesn't come out the first time, fudge on the width of your strip a little. Luckily mine came out the first time but I can see where you might have to adjust depending on your paper cutter, your eyes, etc.

Then to get one complete snowflake, use sharp paper scissors and just trim one out from the row, clipping carefully around the tiny scallop edges where necessary. This really expands the use you will get from this punch. It was $18 at JoAnn's and I used a fifty off coupon which made it $9 plus tax so I'm a happy camper. If all of this isn't clear to you, just drop me an email and I'll help you through it or post more photos if necessary. Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.