Beautiful Box

This is such a beautiful little box.

Finished size is about 3 inches round x 2 1/2 inches tall. cut from an 8 1/2 inch piece of cardstock. The design was saying that it needed 2-sided cardstock so I printed one up from Tracy Ann Digital Art from 2 different files but they were only $4.25 each and i already had one.

The hard part would have been the scoring the curved edges, but after the other day I just went ahead and scored the lines @ 13 Thickness and carefully folded the lines so that when glued they would just fall into place with a gentle nudge (for a box, that is).

Files used for the paper were:

• Susie_Q Melon leafy paper 7
• Bold Blooms paper 6

I usually change the names of the papers so they are more descriptive when i go looking through the folder but leave the number with it so when you open your file and expect it to be called leafy, it won’t be called that. But i do think it is paper  # 7.

The Silhouette Files used are:

• star_top_box_C00586_20509
• leaf_vine_border_adornment_C00482_19210
• 5_petal_flower_C00041_27011

Finished Box and…

a couple of cutting files in .gsd format and jpg. I am sorry I don’t have other formats but it is way above my financial means at this time to get the software and or machines. So if you have make the cut or similar to take a jpg file and trace it then you are welcome to do that; i placed it down below the box information on this post. In any event the .jpg can be cut by hand. You will have to re-size to fit your card or layout.

I have finished my little box and it is now ready to be filled and given to someone.
 
 

I made a little daisy (opening up) bud by taking a smaller daisy and folding it into quarters and the calyx was made from a snowflake punch and glued to the bottom of the partially opened daisy. A little star shaped flower would have been more suitable but this was handy. Everything was cut on the Silhouette except the calyx.

Files used are:

• box_bottom_0928
• box_top_0929
• 3_flower-sprig_with_butterfly_C00480_19210
• 12-petal_flowers_C00667_20509
• fern_frond_C00374_23067
• Grannie's Wallpaper from Pink Petticoat (listed under Digital Stuff)

box_
I did the bottom label first and then the top label using the closed spline tool. If anyone is interested I will give a small (all i know) tutorial on that marvelous tool. The cutting file is listed at the right under Cutting Files & Tutorials.

Flower in video

Thought, since i don't have the right stuff to do a video tutorial of my rose, I would post this little video that shows the procedure for making the rose and other flowers. This is not the only way, but is one way to make lovely flowers.



And Fred She Says has the Rose/Poppy digital file on sale this week if anyone is interested. Of course you can always have mine...it's listed int he right hand coloumn and it is free.

The Card from the Tutorial

Cassie’s Brocade makes such a beautiful background and the with the distress inks (Dusty Concord and Antique Linen), I really liked the look. After removing my shapes from the mat i used Old Paper first, the Antique Linen on  both pieces to my liking. the scalloped circle for the mat was painted with Yasutomo’s Pearlescent paints along the edge.

The butterfly is done with the same paints on both layers. It doesn’t show up like I would like it to; the card is really very pretty. The fern that you see was cut on the silhouette but when I went back to check on the website it was no longer there. The rose leaves and the fern were both colored with distress ink Peeled Paint and a cotton ball before taking off the mat (carrier sheet). The rose was colored with Victorian Velvet.

The cutting files used:

• 3_flower_sprig_with_butterfly_C00480_19210
• my rose file listed at right under cutting files
• circle_scallop_MED_1181 altered

Got the perfect layout?

You’ve got you design all layed out and the flowers in plae then you have to move the flowers to put the glue on. Sometimes I have trouble, one way or another, making sure that my flowers land up i the same place as i found i liked them before i glued them into place on the card or other project. So I decided to make a little template. This post is how i did that.\

this is the way i want my flowers to look like when I have applied the glue and put them into place on my project.

I then took a piece of wax paper about the size of the object that the flowers are going to be glued onto and laid it carefully over the flowers and leaves then marked the flower centers and the stem of the leaf cluster starting at the base of the furthest out leaf. The daisies and roses are marked with a circle while little flowers are marked with a dot right in the center of the flower.

I marked the flowers in the order that they will be placed onto the object with a number and punched a hole through the wax paper to place the glue. I used a larger hole for the larger flowers as more glue is needed as well as I need to know that this will be the larger flower. For the leaf lines, I cut a slit in the paper.

Next i laid the wax paper template on the object i want the flowers on and placed a dot or line of glue (mono multi) in the hole of the template and carefully lifted the template off and laid it aside. I let the glue dry just a little (mono multi dries quickly) till it was just tacky enough the flowers wouldn’t go sliding, and laid the flowers and leaves down in the order I wrote on the template. You do need to remember to lay the template in a safe area of the work area because there is a little glue that will be on the template itself

The flowers are glued and waiting the next step.

I save the template with the other cut flowers in a snack-size baggie and have them in a candy box.

Fragrance of Roses

 

This little card is a scrap of cardstock 4 7/8 x 1 7/8 inches wide and covered with distress inks in shabby shutters, tattered roses and victorian violet. The rose (1 1/2 inches) is done with Dick Blick’s Sulphite Drawing paper and covered with victorian violet with a cotton ball. The sentiment is an old PSX stamp that is one of my favorites.

The leaves are a punch and a spray i cut on the Silhouette. I should have stamped the sentiment before i put the leaves on but i didn’t think to do that at the time.

A strip of card board on the back with a bit of ribbon to keep it standing making it an easel card.

the original information on the rose and name of the leaf spray is here and here so you can print and cut by hand and the cutting file for the rose is in the right-hand column. Sorry it is not a real tutorial on the rose; i don’t know if anyone needs to have one. If you are printing and cutting by hand it might be easier to color before you cut them out, loading your cotton ball with some color and starting at the center of each petal layer, in a circular motion, move out to the edge of the petals. If you are cutting on the silhouette you could color before removing from the backing sheet. I do make sure that i color both sides of the bottom and top 2 layers but it would be best to make sure that all are colored on the back.

Fanciful Flower

I have this flower from Fred She Says which is probably my favorite, and did some coloring fun this last weekend. I tried to do a wood rose look to this flower and used Neocolor II water color crayons in #049 raw umber (which has a greenish-brown look to it) and #039 Olive brown for the flower trimmed it with The beautiful Sakura’s gelly roll pen ‘clear star’ glitter on the accent lines. The leaves were colored with the same 2 colors and #025 green ochre and used the same glitter pen on the accent lines.

My inspiration for the card came from a challenge to use white with one color (with accent splashes of another color allowed) and used Impression Obsessions' fantasy berry vine flourish stamped in metallic gold. I don’t know if this really qualifies for that but comes as close as i had materials to match the flower.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with water color crayons, these are really neat color sticks that are like crayons but a softer formula that melt with water. Stampin’ UP! makes them and Dick Blick carries Caran d’Ache of Switzerland. They are not inexpensive and because of the formula will turn out a little bit like transparent gauche paints. Since i like to use Dick Blick’s drawing paper for the flowers i paired it with a water brush and watercolor crayons.

When laying in the color on the flower you want to use a light hand; you would be surprised at how little it takes. And I find the water brush adds just enough water and keeps a flow of that amount; the paper does not wrinkle but it is enough to blend the colors to the paper.
I forgot to mention that i entered this card to the Paper Sundaes challenge, the logo is at top right. Just click on it to go to that site.

Hey, Guys! I just found something new!

As we all know when printing your own paper it does not have the surface permanence of store bought paper. and so you have to be very careful not to let a drop of water onto this paper as that drop of water shows! whether you wipe it off or not. And if you wipe it off or bolt it it is likely to show worse than anything! So I was playing around again, last night with water color crayons on a stamp and i misted it with water and then stamped my paper scrap to see what i could come up with. Well I found that i did not see the color (it was a very pale pink, anyway) but the design was still there. in a shadow or watermark style. And as it was late at night i thought my eyes might be fooling me. But, no, this morning the design is still there and i can find traces of the pink. I will remember this and if I want the color to show I will use a deeper color. I don’t know if i want to do this with crayons though…

So I tried doing this with just plain water and it worked!

With that in mind I decided to do some flowers to go on this piece with my birdcage stamp (which is a cling stamp and every time I think I have it on straight and I take the stamp off – it’s crooked; so i trimmed the paper to fit.)

Then after painting these I decided to try something and came up with…

I don’t know how obvious this is but the 2 yellow flowers on the right are outlined with gelly roll pens; clear and black. The 2 yellow flowers on the left were painted with not outline protection and the ink bled al little less but I was using less water and the paper had had more time to dry. The pink and lavender flowers were done the same time as the flowers on the card front above.

The paper i used is the new ‘Pure as Silk’ water color paper and I could not emboss it as the printer ink was so thoroughly dry by the time the half sheet of flower came out. I thought it might be worth the try as water color paper, though absorbent, has a binder in it to help make water colors flow nicely and not be absorbed but lay on the top of the paper. So there are my findings for the day.

My little Birdie

I have this new stamp I saw that was just so cute and cheery I just had to buy him.

and i worked on this card for Mel of Mel Stampz who has not put anything up on her blog for a while so I thought she needed some cheerin’ up; so here it is and if she emails me i will mail it to her.

background paper is Mel’s ‘dream definition’ I downloaded from her blog and printed out.  I used 2/3 of it for the front and the other 1/3 inside covered with some white acrylic paint for the sentiment area. Card stock is Stampin’ Up!’s and the flower is from Fred She Said. I printed the flowers out on Dick Blick’s Sulphite drawing paper and colored directly with water color crayons then went over them with water and brush. This paper works very well as a general purpose craft paper as it accepts water colors better than most papers if you don’t use too wet a brush and shapes so well when water is applied to paper for flowers (although I did not do any ore than jut color the flower and leaves and shape with paper styluses. The Bird is painted with yasutomo’s pearlescent paints. I added some painted accent to the tail and top knot feathers also.

Font used is ‘factory’.

Chair Box

PCP (Paper Craft Planet) has a 3-D challenge this week with a free cutting file for the 2x2 1/4x5 1/4-inch chair box that I thought was so cute. I downloaded the file (which you can get if you are a member of PCP) and decided to make the little box. I didn’t do too bad…the bottom doesn’t lay quite flat which is due to the score being off 1 micro-mm and the top of the box keeps popping up 1/8th inch but otherwise it came out all right. With yesterday’s post I printed up a 2-sided paper for this project making sure that the leaf paper was going in the right direction for the chair.

The flowers were cut from the leftover pieces; 3 sets of McGill’s Petite Petals punch. The little pointy flower has stamens of embroidery thread that I cut a doubled length of (2 1/2 inches – which is folded in half) and tied a knot in the center with the help of a crochet hook. Then spread the threads out with a pin, needle or similar, and glued to the center with monomulti by Tombow. This glue dries quickly and clear, going on white so that you can see where it goes; a benefit for those with ’failing’ eyesight. The flower in the center front of the box is 3 layers of the rounded petal flower, shaped and Mill Hill beads glued to the flower for the center. The leaves are a Martha Stewart punch and I had taken a bit of Dick Blick’s drawing paper and laid it into a bath of Shabby Shutters some time ago.
The Ribbon bow would not cooperate (with one loop sticking forward stubbornly) and so i will not give it any credit. I really don’t know where it came from anyway; i inherited it from another lady's collection.

Fred She Said challenge

Well is it really not April anymore but the page is still accepting applicants and while my little card is not very much her it is! So I will be entering that challenge.

I have had a very difficult time with this, not making the card, but getting a photo of it and it still is not very good.

I used Prism Herbal green that i love for the first background, and Neenah for the dotted swiss with faux eyelet edging at the bottom. This was actually re-claimed from a card I was trying to make but didn’t come out of the machine cut correctly; it was a little off for some reason. And while the silhouette store has a scalloped square i could have used, I made my own and then made the card. That is another story though.

Pansies are one of my most favorite flowers and I had just a tiny amount of money to spend so I bought the colored set; both the blue and purple. I just love it! I put this through the Silhouette machine software (which is Craft Robo) printing it out on Neenah Cardstock and then running it through the machine to cut the circle. I had also set in a couple of extra pansies to make this a Paper Tole Project. I made sure that the little pansies were going to be all the same size by sizing a single pansy over the main pansy. Then copy/pasted another image after moving it to the side. My circle was drawn first then the print of the pansy cup was place in the sircle and sized to fit nicley.

Guess i need to get an new camera because mine is not taking a good enough photo of the card and it is hard to see that it is layered. But here it is. I thank you Fred, for the lovely little pansies and all the delightful little flowers on your site.

Card on Shoestring Budget

I found some of the cutest digital paper @ Tracy Ann Digital Art

The set of 12 papers was just so sweet and cute I just had to get it. I found this spot after looking for some paper that Mel Stamps was using for a recent post and will be getting that as well as others.

I did re-size the papers as they are for 12x12 inch scrapbook paper and I was using 8.5 x 11 paper and besides the scale of the design usually comes out better for card making if scaled down some. I used a $9.99 program from Serif to size the papers and print them out.

The cute image came from  Sassy Cheryl’s who has some freebie images on Paper Craft Planet.

The scalloped oval behind the digi-stamp is color matched to the paper with a freebie color picker then cut on the Silhouette (both done in the Craft Robo program that comes with the Silhouette). The the embellishemnt (flower trio) was also silhouette sd cut and colored with a q-tip before taking apart from the rest of the paper with VersaMagic Dew Drop “Malted Mauve” and Distress “Shabby Shutters”.

Little box

I had this little flower -

It’s been sitting on my desk waiting for me to make something with it. So i decided, finally, on a box with the flower on top. This is what came of that.

Materials

• match box template that I had downloaded from Mel Stampz blog but you can also get one from Mirkwood Designs.
• 26 gauge brass jewelry wire (Wal-Mart)
• beads (dollar tree jewelry kit – butterfly knob and bead feet)
• glue I used for attaching things was Monomulti except the butterfly knob which is stuck onto the drawer with a 3D Dot square.
• The flower was cut from Blick’s Sulphite Drawing paper and colored with Distress ink and the flower center is embroidery floss.

The box is very fragile due to the lightweight paper but the paper was so pretty and it will not be doing any heavy duty work, I figured I could live with it like that.

Cutting File for the Rose

The cutting file for the Rose can be found here : flower_1rose1.GSD
For those having to do this the ancient way I have a pattern for you here...

You can size this any size to make any size rose you want.

Need a Hug?

No matter what you are going through, maybe you are needing a hug today. Here is one for you from me. I can make that many cards and mail them out to you but you can save the photo and remember every time you look at it that God has a hug for you.

I learned a couple of things this morning. The first is my lovely Canon MP210 (printer) has a setting that can speed up or slow down the drying time of the ink. that makes it nice for embossing digi-stamps.

The other one is really a no-brainer but i messed up. I printed the sentiment onto sticker paper (Avery 4383) and besides the fact that i should have made it a little bit smaller I cut to shape and i should have just pressed it onto the white layer of the tag and trimmed to match the tag.  Instead i shape cut it ( ;) )and the edges are showing, but it isn’t too bad. I did a neat little trick of 2 layers on the ‘hug?’ the bottom layer is gold with an upper layer sized just a little smaller and in colors to match the paper.

Materials

• Basic Grey Sugar Rush 6x6 pad
• Neenah cardstock
• Penny Black ‘Hugs"’ clear stamp set
• Mulberry Street paper flowers
• Puffy Velvet
• Water color pencils
• Dove blender

Card size is 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches. the Shape for the images (with mat cut a little larger) I cut on the silhouette from a shape scanned then imported onto the Robo Master software and then an outline was made from that. After the outline was pasted onto the image I un-grouped it and deleted the background image. I cut the white layer at 2 5/8”  and the mat at 2 7/8”.
The sentiment tag is an SEI file (nameplates_C00011_27011 – keyword: tags, nameplate, label) Silhouette file of 4.
The scroll is a pair of scrolls (rough_swashes_C00138_23067 – keyword: flourish) not joined, done by hero Arts for Silhouette
The leaf stem is branch (branch_C00022_23851 – keyword: leaves) by Donna Downey and would be great for Sunflowers. I cut mine just a smidgeon over 2 inches long or tall on some Dick Blick student drawing paper and did a Tim Holtz technique for coloring with peeled paint Distress Ink. I was trying for a mottled look and did get it on one branch but not this one.
The flower centre is Puffy Velvet and i painted it yellow with water color pencils and used just pain water (I didn’t know how it would react to the dove blending solution)

Flowers on Silhouette

I love those little flowers that help add something to a card. And i saw some by prima that i wanted really bad but couldn’t afford. So i did my own!
I took a sheet of lighter than 80 lb. card stock and some Paper Plus Decoupage Finish and used the handy scraper tool (like Tim Holtz’s) to spread the decoupage glue over the cardstock and then placed a piece of paper from a Godey’s Ladie’s Magazine on top smoothing into place before laying books on top to dry. I hope somebody out there will not be too upset with me. I only used a page from a silly story (they were almost all too silly) and the print is very small. The flower is just a smidge over 1 1/2 inches diameter. The petals (i drew 3 and copied and pasted them around, rotating to fit nicely) were just placed around an imaginary center over which a circle was placed to from the flower center and these were joined. Then i noticed a couple of overlapping petals not covered by the center so i took another little circle and joined that to the flower over those cuts so they would disappear.
It was trial and error as the first one i did did not cut all the way through. The next time I put on all the ‘stops’ i could. I set the paper for 100 lb. tag, used the pink blade spacer, speed at 7 and thickness all the way up to 33.
My flower center was some embroidery thread snipped really fine over Mono Multi glue in the center of the flower.

the card is finished and looks even nicer than the photo, really. I used Distress inks for the background in dusty concord, milled lavender, peeled paint and shabby shutters on Neenah cardstock. Then I stamped the butterflies in Memento's Rich Cocoa ink, placed  the flourish on this and sprayed a little Tattered Angels Iridescent Gold over that. the flower went on last but could have been included in the gold spray. This was placed onto some white paper from the Bittersweet (6x6) Collection which has very nice green grungy tones and then onto a piece of frosted amethyst Prism Cardstock which is not frosted, it’s just the name for the lighter tone.
The flourish is in the Silhouette online store as well as other flowers. I do have the cutting file that i used for this flower and if anyone wants a copy of the file they can email me and i will send a copy. I can only do .gsd file format at this time.
Have you ever wondered what the coloring is of a real Hedge hog? You can check it out here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog